Marlene turned her face to her daughter and gave her a wet and loud Bronx cheer. “You’re misinterpreting friendly repartee between two mature grown-ups. Not everyone is governed by hormones, no matter what that twenty-two-year-old body is telling you. Now quit with the aspersions on my moral character,” she said. “Or do I need to send a note to Dan Heeney about a certain young cowboy who seems to have his eye on a little filly named Lucy?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. And you wouldn’t dare,” Lucy said blushing. Both women laughed, a sound that had been sparse in their relationship for the past couple of years but seemed to be making a comeback as of late.
As the giggles subsided, Marlene admitted to herself that John Jojola was indeed an attractive man. Not so much his looks, which were more exotic than handsome, though he had a nice smile that showed well against the bronze skin of his face, nor his physique—muscular, but shaped like a barrel. It was more the way he carried himself as though his body was simply the outward expression of some inner quality that made him seem taller than he actually was and self-assured. He’s a lot like this land, she thought, steady, strong…harsh in a way but with a beauty that grows on you.
She also found his boyish shyness around women to be charming. Like most people, he’d had a difficult time trying to decide if he should focus on her one real eye or pretend that he didn’t notice and look her in the eyes. Then, in his confusion, he’d dropped his gaze to her tits. She laughed out loud recalling the moment he realized what he was doing—and that he’d been caught—and blushed like a virgin at a strip show.
“What are you laughing about?” Lucy asked, an eyebrow raised suspiciously.
“Nothing, just a moment of silliness,” Marlene answered. You have to admit he regained his composure quickly, she thought, and his eyes were laughing at his own discomfiture. She also liked that when he did look back at her face, it was without pity for the lost eye. In fact, his gaze was the sort most women enjoyed, polite admiration. But she had no illusions of the attraction going any further.
During her darkest days of hiding out on the dog farm on Long Island, when her nights were drowned in booze and self-loathing, she’d barely resisted the advances of Billy, the handsome young dog handler who’d made it known that he would come running if she whistled. The thought of trying to exorcise her demons on his tan, well-sculpted body had crossed her mind on a number of occasions when the loneliness threatened to strangle her and she felt she couldn’t sink much lower anyway. But in the final analysis, she was still the Catholic schoolgirl who’d never been the sort to sleep around, even when she was single. The bottom line was she loved the man she’d married, and there was no one else she was willing to share her body with.
Just thinking about Butch, as well as the other two main men in her life—her sons, Giancarlo and Zak—made her homesick. Still, she was glad she had come to this big spiritual land and felt some of the power that seemed to mold the people who lived here like John Jojola. Nor was she ready to leave it yet…if ever.
• • •
Just before she fled New York City in April, Marlene felt like an overripe tomato about to burst in the sun. She knew that her family took her continued presence in the home after stopping the attempt to bomb the courthouse as a sign that she was returning to normal, whatever that was. But the truth was that every day she had to combat the urge to run away, back to the solitude and unquestioning loyalty of her dogs. There were too many dark memories, too many ghosts in New York City.
Leaving the loft on Crosby and Grand, she and Lucy headed north on Broadway until turning west into the Holland Tunnel. As they emerged on the other side of the Hudson River, they’d cheered as though they’d thrown off the shackles of city life and were embarking on some grand adventure. The high continued as they hit Interstate 80 and headed away from the rising sun.
The happy talk lasted most of the way across Pennsylvania, as they made a big show of mother-daughter bonding. But it couldn’t last. By the time they hit Indiana, Marlene was beginning to regret encouraging Lucy when her daughter said she wanted to come on the trip.
It had seemed like a good idea, a way to recapture the closeness they’d once shared. They’d planned the route together, lying side by side on the living room floor as they poured over maps and tourist guidebooks. Their favorite was a photography book on New Mexico called Land of Enchantment, ooohing and aaaahing their way through page after page of exotic scenery.
They talked about what they were going to do when they arrived. And how, while they would be together, they would have their own projects “so we won’t be getting into each other’s hair.” Marlene was going to learn to paint and sculpt. She avoided talking about the therapy side of the art center and Lucy let it be. Lucy was excited about the opportunity to assimilate a new language. “Tiwa—it’s one of the oldest, most unique languages in the world; only the Taos Pueblo Indians speak it.” She, too, skirted the deeper issues.
Through their friend Father Dugan, Lucy found a job working at the youth center on the Taos reservation. It wasn’t going to pay much, but enough to give her a little spending money while her mom paid for their rooms at a historic hotel called the Sagebrush Inn. “They even have fireplaces in the room,” Lucy reported, after finding the inn on the Internet.
They’d agreed that as they drove they should take their time, get off the interstates as much as possible, and travel along the smaller “blue” highways that would give them a chance to explore small towns and see the real America. They’d tried their best to hold onto the original plan and the camaraderie—even taking a quick automobile tour of several of Indiana’s famous covered bridges and agreeing that Clint Eastwood was far too old and wrinkled to be playing the leading man in romantic films anymore.
Yet the laughter was becoming strained and the conversations labored. Small talk and road games only went so far when there were deeper issues—internal, as well as between the two of them—waiting to break through to the surface. Gradually they fell silent, lost in their own thoughts as great expanses of the Midwest passed with only enough verbiage to arrange a rest room stop or something to eat. It began to seem like the monotonous fields of newly sprouted corn would never end; each town with its water tower and neat, tree-lined yards with American flags began to look like the one they’d just passed. At the beginning of their trip, they’d eaten at whatever they thought qualified as a quaint small-town café, thumbing their noses at the poor souls on the interstates who had no choice but to suffer through McDonald’s and Taco Bell. But by the Nebraska-Iowa border they were tired of overfriendly or overgrumpy waitresses in stained aprons, and the way big sweaty men in John Deere hats and overalls stopped talking when Marlene and Lucy entered and stared at them as if they had come from another world.
The women decided to hop back on Interstate 80 so they could get there quicker, convinced that the miasma that had taken over the trip would evaporate when they crossed into the Land of Enchantment, as if it were the Land of Oz. They stopped only for gas, the rest room, and food—joining the poor souls who ordered their meals at the drive-thru, and kept going.
It was an unhealthy silence that built up inside of them like the thunderstorms that rose above the prairie every afternoon. The driver kept her eyes on the horizon, trying not to let the white lines passing under the hood hypnotize her into falling asleep at the wheel. Meanwhile, the passenger pretended to read a book—going over and over the same page when she’d lose focus—or simply stared out the window at the succession of isolated farmhouses and insectlike irrigation machines that spit and crawled across the fields.
By the time they reached the town of North Platte, three-fourths of the way across Nebraska, the politeness was gone, replaced by a testiness that had them both on edge and looking for a reason to fight. They got their chance when Lucy was pulled over doing ninety-five miles per hour.
“Going a little fast back there, ma’am,” the trooper noted as he looked a
t her driver’s license.
“I told her to slow down, officer, but you know kids, they never listen,” Marlene said with a smile, leaning over from the passenger seat. She was hoping to sweet-talk her daughter out of a ticket, but Lucy took it differently.
“Don’t treat me like a child,” she snapped. “You were driving just as fast an hour ago.”
“Oh, please,” Marlene laughed. The trooper was peering in the window and although she couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, his mouth was turned down in a frown. “I guess I should be driving, if you’re going to act like a child.”
“Fine!” Lucy exploded and opened the door, nearly hitting the trooper. She popped out of the car like a jack-in-the-box and stormed around the back of the car, as Marlene flung open her door and met her partway. “You want to drive, you drive,” Lucy yelled, “but don’t act like you haven’t broken every law in the book and a few they haven’t even thought of yet.”
“Lucy that’s enough,” Marlene said. It was her turn to be angry. “You’re such a saint. Breaking a rule or two might get you to stop walking around like you have a Bible stuck up your butt.”
“At least I didn’t run out on my family and shack up with Billy the Dog-boy of Long Island,” Lucy sneered.
Marlene’s hand responded without her thinking about it and slapped her daughter soundly across the cheek. More surprising, Lucy slapped her back. Suddenly the women were grappling, scratching, and shrieking. The alarmed trooper moved to break it up, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the two wildcats tumbled off the shoulder of the road and down into an irrigation ditch filled with knee-high water. Mud, water, and curses flew every which way.
The young trooper was still trying to figure out how his day had turned into something out of the movie Thelma and Louise, and how he was going to get the women out of the ditch, when they suddenly sat down on their butts and started laughing. They were quite the sight—their clothing soaked and covered with a film of gravy-colored mud, as was their hair and the uncovered parts of their bodies.
“You look ridiculous,” Marlene said between guffaws.
“Well, you’re not exactly dressed for the opera,” Lucy chortled.
The whole incident seemed impossibly funny, and they laughed until they were gasping for breath. Only then did it occur to them to look up at the trooper, who was standing on the edge of the ditch scratching his head. “You ladies aren’t from around here are you?” he said.
Marlene and Lucy looked at each other and burst into laughter again. “Nope, we’re from New York,” they said in unison.
“Well, I guess that explains it,” the trooper replied to additional gales. “Now, if you’d kindly stand up and give me your hands, I’ll help you out of that ditch.”
Once they were standing on the road, Marlene insisted on being allowed to change their clothes right then and there. “You’re not getting in my baby like that,” she warned Lucy.
Nebraska State Trooper Henry “Hank” Hudson was thinking that the boys back at the shop were never going to believe this one, when Marlene asked if he was going to watch them disrobe. He stammered and turned as red as the flashing light on top of his car. “I, uh, I’ll just, um, stand over here,” he said, fully aware now that neither woman was wearing a bra beneath her wet shirt. He turned and bumped into the rear of the truck, causing the women to laugh again.
Marlene produced a towel and a bottle of water with which they cleaned up as best they could before jumping into new shorts and shirts. “You may turn around now, officer,” she said. “And do your duty to my poor child.” But Trooper Hudson had been through quite enough with those two and let Lucy off with a warning. He even smiled when he said he hoped they’d wait until they reached Colorado before they decided to go for another swim. “Public nudity is illegal in Nebraska.”
“The Mother of All Irrigation Ditch Battles,” as the incident would forever be known in the family, proved to be the best thing that could have happened. The tension that had been building up for the past five hundred miles had been released, the way rain seemed to drain thunderstorms of their spite.
“I’m sorry, Luce,” Marlene said as she pulled back on the highway, “for everything. I haven’t been much of a mom.”
Lucy shook her head. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. God seems to have some crazy plans for this family; you’re just playing out the role given to you. Besides, I think that whole mom thing is vastly overrated. Look at all the messed-up kids raised by perfectly normal, nonfelonious mothers.”
Marlene knew forgiveness wasn’t as easy as all that and there would be tougher discussions. But at least it seemed that there would be time to delve into them, and for now it was enough that they could joke about it. “Well, you certainly turned out well, in spite of me,” she said.
“Yeah, Saint Lucy the Virgin,” her daughter replied.
“Yin to my yang,” Marlene added, and they both laughed.
Reliving each moment of their battle and the consternation of “that cute” trooper Hudson, they drove across the border into Colorado, headed for the distant purple shadow on the horizon they figured was the Rocky Mountains. Humor had returned to the car, but there was something else that had been missing until the fight: the ability to really communicate on a level that would have been impossible until Trooper Hudson had pulled them over.
Marlene talked a little about the fears and guilt that drove her to seek asylum at the tail end of Long Island. “I’m not quite ready to go into this real deep,” she said. “But I want you to know that it had nothing to do with any of you, except maybe—rightly or wrongly—this idea that I was somehow protecting you all from me.”
Changing the subject to something lighter, Marlene even brought up her passing infatuation with Billy the Dog-boy of Long Island. But she had a motive that went beyond girls talking about guys.
Lucy had never told her parents much about her ordeal with the monstrous Felix Tighe. She said she couldn’t remember everything, but Marlene believed that she recalled more than she let on and was trying to spare them the horrific details. The doctors at the emergency room where Lucy had been taken said she’d been sexually assaulted, though the lack of any semen or other bodily fluids indicated that the penetration was with an object other than his penis. So technically, Lucy was still a virgin, something she’d insisted she would maintain until marriage. But, especially after talking to Lucy’s boyfriend, Dan Heeney, who told her that Lucy no longer wanted to fool around, Marlene was concerned that her daughter’s interest in men had been crushed.
However, she wasn’t quite ready for Lucy’s response when Marlene noted that Billy had one fine set of buns.
“You fuck him?” Lucy asked.
“God, Luce,” Marlene chuckled to cover her surprise at the question, “for a saint, your mouth would do a sailor proud.”
“I learned at the knee of my dear mother,” Lucy said. “So did you engage in sexual intercourse with Billy the Dog-boy? Maybe a little doggie-style?”
Marlene looked at her daughter, who was smiling but with anxiety written all over her face. Daddy’s little girl wants to know if Mommy’s been cheating on her hero, she thought, and was glad she could honestly answer, “No. But there were a few times when I wanted to.”
The answer seemed to relieve Lucy, though she disguised it with humor. “Good, I’d hate to have a litter of puppies for siblings,” she said. “Though to be honest, they might be easier to house-train than the two I’ve got.”
Marlene smiled and thought maybe the moment had come to probe a little. “So have you given any more thought to when you’re going to finally let Dan into the Promised Land?”
The smile disappeared from Lucy’s face. “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe never. It used to be I couldn’t wait to get married just so we could do it. But sex just doesn’t seem to hold any appeal for me right now.”
Marlene nodded and bit her lip to keep from crying. She didn’t care what her husband thought regardi
ng even a Tighe’s right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. If someone, probably David Grale, hadn’t killed the asshole, she would have put a bullet through his black heart and happily accepted the consequences.
Before the mud-wrestling incident, the ensuing silence after Lucy’s admission would have destroyed whatever chemistry they’d been experiencing. But while it was clear that Lucy didn’t want to talk about sex or Tighe anymore, they now shifted into other subjects without missing a beat.
That evening they checked into the Brown Palace, a famous hotel in downtown Denver from the days when cattle barons ran that part of the country and insisted on luxury when they came to town on business. After showers to remove the remaining traces of Nebraska, the women retired to the bar, where they downed pitchers of margaritas until the bartender said he had to close. They then staggered back to their room, where they fell asleep on the same bed, curled up together like a couple of kittens.
They woke up the next morning with an unkind troll banging drums and cymbals in their heads and a taste in their mouths not unlike a muddy Nebraska irrigation ditch. But they accepted their hangovers as a reasonable price for the change that had come over their relationship. As they climbed back in the truck to continue their journey, they were more than just mother and daughter. They were friends who’d finally gotten past the bullshit and could truly start on that grand adventure they had sought when crossing the Hudson into Jersey via the Holland Tunnel.
• • •
Rather than take Interstate 25 south to northeastern New Mexico, the women decided to first head west on Highway 285 out of Denver and into the looming mountains. For the first time in her life, Marlene, who took the first driving shift, was intimidated by a road. Normally fearless and lead-footed, she now crawled around curves that seemed designed to launch unsuspecting motorists off precipices or into forests.
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