“He weeded my garden,” I say.
“They’re not going to stop as long as you feed them.”
“Like stray cats,” I say.
Albuquerque has never been a pretty town. When I came, it was mostly strip malls and big-box stores and suburbs. Ten years of averages of four inches of rain or less have hurt it badly, especially with the loss of the San Juan/Chama water rights. Water is expensive in Albuquerque. Too expensive for Intel, which pulled out. Intel was just a larger blow in a series of blows.
The suburbs are full of walkaway houses—places where homeowners couldn’t meet the mortgage payments and just left, the lots now full of trash and windows gone. People who could went north for water. People who couldn’t did what people always do when an economy goes soft and rotten: they slid, to rented houses, rented apartments, living in their cars, living with their families, living on the street.
But inside Sherie’s parents’ home it’s still twenty years ago. The countertops are granite. The big-screen plasma TV gets hundreds of channels. The freezer is full of meat and frozen Lean Cuisine. The air conditioner keeps the temperature at a heavenly seventy-five degrees. Sherie’s mother, Brenda, is slim, with beautifully styled graying hair. She’s a psychologist with a small practice.
Brenda has one of my dolls, which she bought because she likes me. It’s always out when I come, but it doesn’t fit Brenda’s tailored, airily comfortable style. I have never heard Brenda say a thing against Ed. But I can only assume that she and Kyle wish Sherie had married someone who worked at Los Alamos or at Sandia or the university, someone with government benefits like health insurance. On the other hand, Sherie was a wild child who, as Brenda said, “did a stint as a lesbian,” as if being a lesbian were like signing up for the Peace Corps. You can’t make your child fall in love with the right kind of person. I wish I could have fallen in love with someone from Los Alamos. More than that, I wish I had been able to get a job at Los Alamos or the university. Me, and half of Albuquerque.
Sherie comes home, her hair rough-cut in her kitchen with a mirror. She is loud and comfortable. Her belly is just a gentle insistent curve under her blue Rumatel goat dewormer T-shirt. Brenda hangs on her every word, knows about the trials and tribulations of raising goats, asks about Ed and the truck. She feeds us lunch.
I thought this life of thoughtful liberalism was my birthright, too. Before I understood that my generation was to be born in interesting times.
At the obstetrician’s office, I sit in the waiting room and try not to fall asleep. I’m stuffed on Brenda’s chicken-and-cheese sandwich and corn chowder. People magazine has an article about Tom Cruise getting telomerase regeneration therapy, which will extend his lifespan an additional forty years. There’s an article on some music guy’s house talking about the new opulence: cutting-edge technology that darkens the windows at the touch of a hand and walls that change color, rooms that sense whether you’re warm or cold and change their temperature, and his love of ancient Turkish and Russian antiques. There’s an article on a woman who has dedicated her life to helping people in Siberia who have AIDS.
Sherie comes out of the doctor’s office on her cellphone. The doctor tells her that if she had insurance, they’d do a routine ultrasound. I can hear half the conversation as she discusses it with her mother. “This little guy,” Sherie says, hand on her belly, “is half good Chinese peasant stock. He’s doing fine.” They decide to wait for another month.
Sherie is convinced that it’s a boy. Ed is convinced it’s a girl. He sings David Bowie’s “China Girl” to Sherie’s stomach, which for some reason irritates the hell out of her.
We stop on our way out of town and stock up on rice and beans, flour, sugar, coffee. We can get all this in Belen, but it’s cheaper at Sam’s Club. Sherie has a membership. I pay half the membership, and she uses the card to buy all our groceries, then I pay her back when we get to the car. The cashiers surely know that we’re sharing a membership, but they don’t care.
It’s a long, hot drive back home. The air conditioning doesn’t work in the truck. I am so grateful to see the trees that mark the valley.
My front door is standing open.
“Who’s here?” Sherie says.
Abby is standing in the front yard, and she has clearly recognized Sherie’s truck. She’s barking her fool head off and wagging her tail, desperate. She runs to the truck. I get out and head for the front door, and she runs toward the door and then back toward me and then toward the door, unwilling to go in until I get there, then lunging through the door ahead of me.
“Hudson?” I call the other dog, but I know if the door is open, he’s out roaming. Lost. My things are strewn everywhere, couch cushions on the floor, my kitchen drawers emptied on the floor, the back door open. I go through to the back, calling the missing dog, hoping against hope he is in the back yard. The back gate is open, too.
Behind me I hear Sherie calling, “Don’t go in there by yourself!”
“My dog is gone,” I say.
“Hudson?” she says.
I go out the back and call for him. There’s no sign of him. He’s a great boy, but some dogs, like Abby, tend to stay close to home. Hudson isn’t one of those dogs.
Sherie and I walk through the house. No one is there. I go out to my workshop. My toolbox is gone, but evidently whoever did this didn’t see the computer closed and sitting on the shelf just above eye level.
It had to be the guy I gave soup to. He probably went nearby to wait out the heat of the day and saw me leave.
I close and lock the gate, and the workshop. Close and lock my back door. Abby clings to me. Dogs don’t like things to be different.
“We’ll look for him,” Sherie says. Abby and I climb into the truck, and for an hour we drive back roads, looking and calling, but there’s no sign of him. Her husband, Ed, calls us. He’s called the county and there’s a deputy at my place waiting to take a statement. We walk through the house, and I identify what’s gone. As best I can tell, it isn’t much. Just the tools, mainly. The sheriff says they are usually looking for money, guns, jewelry. I had all my cards and my cell phone with me, and all my jewelry is inexpensive stuff. I don’t have a gun.
I tell the deputy about the migrant this morning. He says it could have been him, or someone else. I get the feeling we’ll never know. He promises to put out the word about the dog.
It is getting dark when they all leave, and I put the couch cushions on the couch. I pick up silverware off the floor and run hot water in the sink to wash it all. Abby stands at the back door, whining, but doesn’t want to go out alone.
It occurs to me suddenly that the doll I was working on is missing. He stole the doll. Why? He’s not going to be able to sell it. To send it home, I guess, to the baby in the photo. Or maybe to his wife, who has a real baby and is undoubtedly feeling a lot less sentimental about infants than most of my customers do. It’s a couple of weeks of work, not full time, but painting, waiting for the paint to cure, painting again.
Abby whines again. Hudson is out there in the dark. Lost dogs don’t do well in the desert. There are rattlesnakes. I didn’t protect him. I sit down on the floor and wrap my arms around Abby’s neck and cry. I’m a stupid woman who is stupid about my dogs, I know. But they are what I have.
I don’t really sleep. I hear noises all night long. I worry about what I am going to do about money.
Replacing the tools is going to be a problem. The next morning I put the first layer of paint on a new doll to replace the stolen one. Then I do something I have resisted doing. Plastic doll parts aren’t the only thing I can mold and sell on the internet. I start a clay model for a dildo. Over the last couple of years I’ve gotten queries from companies who have seen the dolls online and asked if I would consider doing dildos for them. Realistic penises aren’t really any more difficult to carve than realistic baby hands. Easier, actually. I can’t send it to Tony; he wouldn’t do dildos. But a few years ago they came out with room-
temperature, medical-grade silicone. I can make my own molds, do small runs, hand finish them. Make them as perfectly lifelike as the dolls. I can hope people will pay for novelty when it comes to sex.
I don’t particularly like making doll parts, but I don’t dislike it, either. Dildos, on the other hand, just make me sad. I don’t think there is anything wrong with using them, it’s not that. It’s just … I don’t know. I’m not going to stop making dolls, I tell myself.
I also email the Chicago couple back and accept the commission for the special, to make the same doll for the third time. Then I take a break and clean my kitchen some more. Sherie calls me to check how I’m doing, and I tell her about the dildos. She laughs. “You should have done it years ago,” she says. “You’ll be rich.”
I laugh, too. And I feel a little better when I finish the call.
I try not to think about Hudson. It’s well over a hundred today. I don’t want to think about him in trouble, without water. I try to concentrate on penile veins. On the stretch of skin underneath the head (I’m making a circumcised penis). When my cell rings, I jump.
The guy on the phone says, “I’ve got a dog here, he’s got this number on his collar. You missing a dog?”
“A golden retriever?” I say.
“Yep.”
“His name is Hudson,” I say. “Oh, thank you. Thank you. I’ll be right there.”
I grab my purse. I’ve got fifty-five dollars in cash. Not much of a reward, but all I can do. “Abby!” I yell. “Come on, girl! Let’s go get Hudson!”
She bounces up from the floor, clueless, but excited by my voice.
“Go for a ride?” I ask.
We get in my ancient red Impreza. It’s not too reliable, but we aren’t going far. We bump across miles of bad road, most of it unpaved, following the GPS directions on my phone, and end up at a trailer in the middle of nowhere. It’s bleached and surrounded by trash—an old easy chair, a kitchen chair lying on its side with one leg broken and the white unstained inside like a scar, an old picnic table. There’s a dirty green cooler and a bunch of empty forty ounce bottles. Frankly, if I saw the place, my assumption would be that the owner made meth. But the old man who opens the door is just an old guy in a baseball cap. Probably living on social security.
“I’m Nick,” he says. He’s wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt, despite the heat. He’s deeply tanned and has a turkey-wattle neck.
I introduce myself. Point to the car and say, “That’s Abby, the smart one that stays home.”
The trailer is dark and smells of old man inside. The couch cushions are covered in cheap throws, one of them decorated with a blue-and-white Christmas snowman. Outside, the scrub shimmers, flattened in the heat. Hudson is lying in front of the sink and scrabbles up when he sees us.
“He was just ambling up the road,” Nick says. “He saw me and came right up.”
“I live over by the river, off 109, between Belen and Jarales,” I say. “Someone broke into my place and left the doors open, and he wandered off.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill the dogs,” Nick says.
I fumble with my purse. “There’s a reward,” I say.
He waves that away. “No, don’t you go starting that.” He says he didn’t do anything but read the tag and give him a drink. “I had dogs all my life,” he says. “I’d want someone to call me.”
I tell him it would mean a lot to me and press the money on him. Hudson leans against my legs to be petted, tongue lolling. He looks fine. No worse for wear.
“Sit a minute. You came all the way out here. Pardon the mess. My sister’s grandson and his friends have been coming out here, and they leave stuff like that,” he says, waving at the junk and the bottles.
“I can’t leave the other dog in the heat,” I say, wanting to leave.
“Bring her inside.”
I don’t want to stay, but I’m grateful, so I bring Abby in out of the heat, and he thumps her and tells me about how he’s lived here since he was in his twenties. He’s a Libertarian, and he doesn’t trust government, and he really doesn’t trust the New Mexico state government which is, in his estimation, a banana republic lacking only the fancy uniforms that third-world dictators seem to love. Then he tells me about how lucky it was that Hudson didn’t get picked up to be a bait dog for the people who raise dogs for dogfights. Then he tells me about how the American economy was destroyed by operatives from Russia as revenge for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Half of what he says is bullshit and the other half is wrong, but he’s just a lonely guy in the middle of the desert, and he brought me back my dog. The least I can do is listen.
I hear a spitting little engine off in the distance. Then a couple of them. It’s the little motorbikes the kids ride. Nick’s eyes narrow as he looks out.
“It’s my sister’s grandson,” he says. “Goddamn.”
He gets up, and Abby whines. He stands, looking out the slatted blinds.
“Goddamn. He’s got a couple of friends,” Nick says. “Look you just get your dogs and don’t say nothing to them, okay? You just go on.”
“Hudson,” I say and clip a lead on him.
Outside, four boys pull into the yard, kicking up dust. They have seen my car and are obviously curious. They wear jumpsuits like prison jumpsuits, only with the sleeves ripped off and the legs cut off just above the knees. Khaki and orange and olive green. One of them has tattoos swirling up his arms.
“Hey, Nick,” the tattooed one says, “new girlfriend?”
“None of your business, Ethan.”
The boy is dark, but his eyes are light blue. Like a Siberian husky. “You a social worker?” the boy says.
“I told you it was none of your business,” Nick says. “The lady is just going.”
“If you’re a social worker, you should know that old Nick is crazy, and you can’t believe nothing he says.”
One of the other boys says, “She isn’t a social worker. Social workers don’t have dogs.”
I step down the steps and walk to my car. The boys sit on their bikes, and I have to walk around them to get to the Impreza. Hudson wants to see them, pulling against his leash, but I hold him in tight.
“You look nervous, lady,” the tattooed boy says.
“Leave her alone, Ethan,” Nick says.
“You shut up, Uncle Nick, or I’ll kick your ass,” the boy says absently, never taking his eyes off me.
Nick says nothing.
I say nothing. I just get my dogs in my car and drive away.
Our life settles into a new normal. I get a response from my dildo email. Nick in Montana is willing to let me sell on his sex site on commission. I make a couple of different models, including one that I paint just as realistically as I would one of the reborn dolls. This means a base coat, then I paint the veins in. Then I bake it. Then I paint an almost translucent layer of color and bake it again. Six layers. And then a clear overlayer of silicone because I don’t think the paint is approved for use this way. I put a pretty hefty price on it and call it a special. At the same time, I am making my other special. The doll for the Chicago couple. I sent the mold to Tony and had him do a third head from it. It, too, requires layers of paint, and sometimes the parts bake side by side.
Because my business is rather slow, I take more time than usual. I am always careful, especially with specials. I think if someone is going to spend the kind of money one of these costs, the doll should be made to the best of my ability. And maybe it is because I have done this doll before, it comes easily and well. I think of the doll that the man who broke into my house stole. I don’t know if he sent it to his wife and daughter in Mexico, or if he even has a wife and daughter in Mexico. I rather suspect he sold it on eBay or some equivalent—although I have watched doll sales and never seen it come up.
This doll is my orphan doll. She is full of sadness. She is inhabited by the loss of so much. I remember my fear when Hudson was wandering the roads of the desert. I imagin
e Rachel Mazar, so haunted by the loss of her own child. The curves of the doll’s tiny fists are porcelain pale. The blue veins at her temples are traceries of the palest of bruises.
When I am finished with her, I package her as carefully as I have ever packaged a doll and send her off.
My dildos go up on the website.
The realistic dildo sits in my workshop, upright, tumescent, a beautiful rosy plum color. It sits on a shelf like a prize, glistening in its topcoat as if it were wet. It was surprisingly fun to make, after years and years of doll parts. It sits there both as an object to admire and as an affront. But, to be frank, I don’t think it is any more immoral than the dolls. There is something straightforward about a dildo. Something much more clear than a doll made to look like a dead child. Something significantly less entangled.
There are no orders for dildos. I lie awake at night thinking about real-estate taxes. My father is dead. My mother lives in subsidized housing for the elderly in Columbus. I haven’t been to see her in years and years, not with the cost of a trip like that. My car wouldn’t make it, and nobody I know can afford to fly anymore. I certainly couldn’t live with her. She would lose her housing if I moved in.
If I lose my house to unpaid taxes, do I live in my car? It seems like the beginning of the long slide. Maybe Sherie and Ed would take the dogs.
I do get a reprieve when the money comes in for the special. Thank God for the Mazars in Chicago. However crazy their motives, they pay promptly and by internet, which allows me to put money against the equity line for the new tools.
I still can’t sleep at night, and instead of putting all the money against my debt, I put the minimum, and I buy a 9 mm handgun. Actually, Ed buys it for me. I don’t even know where to get a gun.
Sherie picks me up in the truck and brings me over to the goat farm. Ed has several guns. He has an old gun safe that belonged to his father. When we get to their place, he is in back, putting creosote on new fence posts, but he is happy to come up to the house.
“So, you’ve given in,” he says, grinning. “You’ve joined the dark side.”
After the Apocalypse Page 8
