Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “I don’t have any plans for you.”

  “So you say.”

  Rhoda finished her makeup and returned to her seat just as the stewardess was coming to look for her. “I’m sorry,” she said, and slipped into the seat beside her cousin. He was shaking the sleep from his head. “We slept too long,” he said. “We must have drunk too much at lunch. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He squinched his eyes together, squirmed around. “It’s okay,” Rhoda said.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I was in the restroom. I figured out Dudley. Want to hear?”

  “Sure. Put on your seat belt.”

  “He has to kill or be killed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He hunts to keep from dying because he was sick when he was a child.”

  “Rhoda.” He gave her his bedside look. Indulgent, skeptical, maddeningly patronizing.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I know you don’t like psychiatry.”

  “Well, I’m not sure it applies to Dudley.” Rhoda gave up, began to leaf through an airplane magazine. Outside the window the beautiful neighborhoods of San Antonio came into view, swimming pools and garages and streets and trees and trucks, an electric station, a lake. The modern world, Rhoda decided, and I’m still here.

  Dudley was waiting for them, standing against a wall, wearing a white shirt and light-colored slacks, beaming at them, happy they were there. They linked arms and began to walk out through the airport, glad to be together, excited to be together, feeling powerful and alive.

  They stopped at several bars to meet people Dudley knew and danced at one place for an hour and then drove in the gathering dark out to the lake where Dudley’s house sat on its lawns, filled with furniture and trophies and mementos of his hunts and marriages. Photographs of his children and his wives covered the walls, mixed with photographs of hunts in India and France and Canada and the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and Africa and Canada and Tennessee. Rugs made from bears were everywhere. Four rhinoceros heads were on one wall. Jaguar, tigers, lions, cougars, mountain sheep. He should have been a biologist, Rhoda thought. He wouldn’t have needed so much room to hang the trophies on.

  They cooked steaks on a patio beside the lake and ate dinner and drank wine and played old fifties music on the stereo and went to bed at twelve. Rhoda had an air-conditioned room on the second floor with a huge bearskin rug on the floor and a leopard on the wall. She cleaned her face and brushed her teeth and put on a gown and fell asleep. At three in the morning she woke. Most of the lights in the house were still on. She wandered out onto the sleeping porch and there were Dudley and Saint John, stretched out on small white enamel beds with a ceiling fan turning lazily above them, their long legs extended from the beds. If I had one chromosome more, she decided. One Y chromosome and I’d be out here on this hot sleeping porch in my underpants instead of in an air-conditioned room in a blue silk dressing gown. I’m glad I am a girl. I really am. They are not as civilized as I am, not as orderly or perfect. She turned off the lights they had left on and went back into her room and brushed her teeth some more and returned to bed. She fell into a dreamless sleep, orderly, perfect, civilized.

  When she woke Dudley was in the kitchen making breakfast. “You ready to go to Mexico?” he asked. He handed her a tortilla filled with scrambled eggs and peppers. “Did you bring your passport?”

  “No, I didn’t think I needed it.”

  “You don’t. It’s all right. Well, we’ll get off by noon I hope. I have to make some phone calls.”

  “Where exactly are we going, Dudley?”

  “To see a man about a dog.” They looked at each other and giggled. It was the thing their father said when their mother asked him where he was going.

  “Okay,” Rhoda said. “When do we leave?”

  It was afternoon before they got away. They were taking a blue Mercedes station wagon. Rhoda kept going out and adding another bottle of water to the supplies.

  “How much water are you going to need?” Saint John asked. “We’ll only be there a few days.”

  “We can throw away any we don’t want,” she answered. “But I’m not coming home with amoebic dysentery.”

  “Take all you want,” Dudley answered. “Just leave room for a suitcase and the guns.”

  “Guns?”

  “Presents for Don Jorge. You will like him, Shorty. Well, Saint John, are we ready?” They were standing beside the station wagon. Saint John handed him the small suitcase that contained their clothes. In a strange little moment of companionship they had decided to pack in one suitcase for the trip. Dudley had pulled a dark leather case from a closet and each of them had chosen a small stack of clothes and put them in. They stuck the suitcase in the space between the bottles of water. Dudley put the gun cases on top of the suitcase. They looked at one another. “Let’s go,” they said.

  “You got the magical-gagical compound?” Saint John asked, as they pulled out of the driveway.

  “In the glove compartment,” Dudley answered. Saint John reached down into the box and brought out a little leather-covered bottle that had come from Spain the first time the two men went there to shoot doves, when Saint John was twenty-nine and Dudley was twenty-seven. Saint John held the bottle up for Rhoda to see. “The sacred tequila bottle,’’ he said. Dudley smiled his twelve-year-old fort-building smile, his face as solemn as an ancient Egyptian priest. That’s what the Egyptians did, Rhoda thought. Had strange bottles of elixir, went on mysterious expeditions and ritual hunts. The Egyptians must have been about twelve years old in the head, about Dudley and Saint John’s age. Remember Gunther told me I was arrested at about fourteen. I don’t think Saint John and Dudley even made it into puberty.

  Saint John raised the little vial-shaped leather-covered bottle. He removed the top. Inside the leather was a very thin bottle of fragile Venetian glass. He took a sip, then passed the sacred bottle to Dudley.

  “Exactly where are we going?” Rhoda asked. “I want to see a map.” Saint John replaced the top on the sacred tequila bottle and restored it to its secret resting place in the glove compartment. Then he took out a map of Mexico and leaned into the back seat to show it to her. “Here,” he said. “About a hundred and twenty miles below Laredo.”

  Then there was the all-night drive into Mexico. The black starless night, the flat fields stretching out to nowhere from the narrow asphalt road, the journey south, the songs they sang, the fathomless richness of the memories they did not speak of, all the summers of their lives together, their matching pairs of chromosomes, the bolts of blue-and-white-striped seersucker that had become their summer playsuits, the ancient washing machine that had washed their clothes on the back porch at Esperanza, the hands that had bathed them, the wars and battles they had fought, the night the fathers beat the boys for stealing the horses to go into town to meet the girls from Deer Park Plantation, the weddings they were in, the funeral of their grandmother when they had all become so terribly shamefully disgustingly drunk, the people they had married and introduced into each other’s lives, the dogs they had raised, the day Saint John came over to Rhoda’s house to help her husband teach the Irish setters how to fuck, the first hippie love-in ever held in New Orleans, how they had gone to it together and climbed up a live oak tree and taught the hippies how to hippie. Their adventures and miraculous escapes and all the years they had managed to ignore most of the rest of the world. The way they feared and adored and dreamed each other. The fathomless idiosyncrasies of the human heart. All of which perhaps explains why it took all night to go one hundred and eighty miles south of the place they left at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  First they goofed around in Laredo. Then they stopped at the border to get temporary visas, then searched for diesel for the Mercedes, then crossed the border, then parked the car, then went to the Cadillac Bar for margaritas, then had dinner, then found the car.

  It was black night when they left the border town of Laredo and beg
an to drive down into Mexico. “Why don’t we spend the night here and go on in the morning?” Rhoda asked a dozen times. “Why drive into Mexico at night?”

  “Nowhere to stop,” Saint John and Dudley said, and kept on going, taking sips out of the sacred bottle, which seemed to hold an inexhaustible supply of tequila. Rhoda was curled up on the back seat using her raincoat for a pillow, trying to think Zen thoughts and live the moment and seize the day and so forth. I could be getting laid, she kept thinking. If I had expended this much time and energy on finding a new boyfriend I could be somewhere right now getting laid. I could have called an old boyfriend. I could have called that good-looking pro scout I gave up because of the AIDS scare.

  “We were the lucky ones,” she said out loud. “We got to live our lives in between the invention of the birth control pill and the onslaught of sexually transmitted diseases. We lived in the best of times.”

  “Still do,” Dudley said.

  “There was syphilis,” Saint John added.

  “But we had penicillin for that,” Rhoda answered. “I mean, there was nothing to fear for about twenty years. If someone wanted to sleep with me and I didn’t want to, I apologized, for God’s sake.”

  “That’s changed?” Dudley asked.

  “It changed for me,” Rhoda said. “I’m scared to death to fuck anyone. I mean it. It just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. I guess if I fell in love I’d change my mind, but how can you fall in love if you never fuck anyone? I can’t fall in love with someone who has never made me come.”

  “Her mouth hasn’t changed,” Saint John said. “Rhoda, do you talk like that in public?”

  “In the big world? Is that what you’re saying? You’re such a prick, Saint John. I don’t know why we let you run around with us. Why do we run around with him, Dudley?”

  “I like him. He’s my buddy.” The men laughed and looked at each other and Saint John handed Dudley the tequila bottle and Dudley handed Saint John the salt. They poured the salt on their folded thumbs and licked it off. They shared a lime. They replaced the top and put the sacred tequila bottle away. Nothing had changed. Dudley and Saint John understood each other perfectly and Rhoda sort of understood them, but not quite. “Unless you are both just as dumb as fucking posts and there is nothing to understand.”

  “What’s she saying now?”

  “I said I want to drive if you are going to get drunk and I want you to stop the car and roll up the windows and let’s sleep until it’s light. I don’t like driving down through this desolate country in the middle of the night. I thought we were going to some hacienda. No one told me I was going to have to spend the night in a car.”

  “We’re going,” Dudley said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

  “It’s two o’clock in the morning and you’ve already been lost twice and I don’t think you have the slightest idea where you’re going.”

  “You want some tequila, Sister?”

  “No, I want to get some sleep.”

  “You stopped drinking too? You don’t get laid and you don’t get drunk, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Then why do you want to be alive?” Dudley shook his head. “Have some tequila, honey. We’ll be where we want to be when we wake up tomorrow. You’ll be glad, you’ll see.”

  “Why baby her?” Saint John said. “If you give in to her, she’ll bitch all week.”

  “Fuck you,” Rhoda said. She sat up and straightened her skirt and blouse and arranged her legs very properly in front of her. He was right, what was she living for? “Hand me that tequila,” she said. “Is there anything to mix it with?”

  “Wasting away again in Margaritaville,” Rhoda started singing. Dudley and Saint John joined in. They worked on country and western songs for a while, which are hard songs to sing, then moved into hymns and lyrics from the fifties and back into hymns and finally, because it was the fourth of July even if they were in Mexico, into God Bless America and oh, say can you see and oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.

  “Wait till you see the maize fields in the daytime,” Dudley said. “That’s how they bait the paloma blanca. Maize fields on one side and irrigation ditches on the other. The whitewings are moving this way, and Don Jorge Aquillar and Mariana have been buying up all the leases for miles around. We’re going to have some hunting this fall. Right, Saint John?”

  “Who are Don Jorge Aquillar and Mariana?” Rhoda asked.

  “The people we’re going to see,” Saint John said. “Right, Dudley,” he went on. “If enough birds come. I can’t bring my friends down here if the birds are scanty.”

  “Jesus, you’ve gotten cynical,” Rhoda said. “Why are you so negative about everything?”

  “Why are you picking on me?”

  “I don’t know, because I’m sick of riding in this car.”

  “Have another drink,” Dudley said. “We’ll be there in a little while. It isn’t far now.” He was right. They went another fifteen miles and began to approach the outskirts of a town. “Agualeguas, 1000 Habitantes,” the sign said. They drove past small adobe buildings, then around a curving dirt road, then past a two-story building and a store and through a darkened neighborhood and went down a paved road and drove another three miles and came to a long brick wall covered with bougainvillea. A tall wrought-iron gate was in the middle of the wall with painted white wooden doves on either side of the lock. Attached to the dove on the right and fluttering in the breeze was an extra wing. Dudley stopped the car and got out and pulled the wing from the dove. It was a billet-doux. “Dearest Dudley,” he read out loud. “I am waiting for you with a worried heart. Ring the bell and we will let you in. Love, Mariana.”

  So this is why we couldn’t stay at a hotel at Laredo, Rhoda thought. So this is why we had to drive all night in the goddamn car. Because his new girlfriend is waiting. I should have known. Well, who cares, I signed on for this trip and this is what is happening. Who knows, maybe she has a brother.

  Dudley rang the bell and a girl in a white skirt came running out of a building and began to fumble with the lock. Then the gates were open and servants appeared and took Rhoda’s bag and led her to a room with beautiful red stone floors and windows that opened onto a patio. They set her bag on one of two small beds and brought her water and turned down the other bed. Rhoda took off her clothes and lay down upon the small wooden bed and went immediately to sleep. Outside the window she could hear Dudley and Saint John and Mariana laughing and talking and pouring drinks. They never stop, Rhoda thought. Fifty-six years old and still spreading seed. “This is Mariana,” Dudley had said when he introduced the girl. “Isn’t she beautiful, Sister? Wouldn’t she make great babies with me?”

  When Rhoda woke she was in a hacienda in Agualeguas, Mexico. Bougainvillea, red tile roofs, a parrot in a cage, rusty red stone floors, a patio with a thatched roof and an oven the size of a cave, ancient walls, soft moist air, beside the oven a bar with wicker stools. Above the bar, cages of doves, paloma blanca and paloma triste, whitewings and mourning doves, very hot and still. I am still, Rhoda thought, this is stillness, this is Zen. A dove mourned, then another and another. The doves woke me, Rhoda decided, or I might have slept all day. It seems I was supposed to come here. It is the still point of the turning earth, like the center, the way I felt one time when Malcolm and I sailed into an atoll in the Grenadines below Bequia and I said, This is the center of the earth, we must stay here forever. Well, we can anchor overnight, he answered, but in the morning we have to push on. No wonder I divorced him. Who could live with someone as work-drugged and insensitive as that. Mother-ridden and work-drugged. My last millionaire. Well, now I’m broke. But at least I’m happy this moment, this morning in this lovely still place with red tiles and thatch and the doves in cages and Saint John and Dudley asleep next door in case I need protection.

  The stillness was broken by the sound of a Mexican man putting chlorine in th
e pool outside Rhoda’s window. She dressed and went out onto the patio to watch. The pool was a beautiful bright blue. The man had put so much chlorine into it that the vapors rose like a cloud above the water. The birch trees beside the pool had turned yellow from the chlorine fumes. They were like yellow aspens, beautiful against the green shrubbery and the red flowers of the bougainvillea. Death is beautiful, Rhoda thought, as long as it isn’t yours. She remembered something. A bullfight poster they had seen in Laredo advertising a bullfight in Monterrey. Let’s go, she had said. I’m in the mood for a bullfight. Of course, the men had answered. They were amazed. When last they messed with Rhoda she had lectured them for hours about going to football games and eating meat.

  Mariana came out from the thatched kitchen carrying a tray with coffee and two cups. Brown sugar and cream.

  “Will you have coffee?” she asked.

  “Con leche, por favor,” Rhoda answered.

  “What will you do today? Have they said?”

  “We are to go see the fields. And maybe to a bullfight. There’s some famous matador fighting in Monterrey.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Guillarmo Perdigo.”

  “Oh, yes, with the Portuguese. They fight the bull from horseback. It’s very exciting.’’

  “Muy dificil?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Your English is so good.”

  “I am from Acapulco. I just came here to help my uncle.”

  “Dudley said it would be a famous place soon. That everyone will be coming here.”

  “We hope it will come true. If the doves come. We have bought up all the leases. We will have a monopoly.”

  “And some fun?”

  “Oh, yes. That too.” Mariana smiled, poured the coffee, looked away.

  “Maybe the shopping clubs will come,” Rhoda said. She watched Mariana, hoping to make her smile. Dudley had told Rhoda that groups of women came down to meet the hunters in Brownsville and Laredo and McAllen. Busloads of women from Shreveport and Baton Rouge came to meet the hunters at the Cadillac Bar and the bars of the Hilton Hotel and the Holiday Inn. It had begun by chance. First the men started coming down to hunt the doves. Then a group of women happened to be shopping in the border towns the same week. There were the bars full of good-looking hunters from all over the United States. So the women went home and told their friends and soon busloads of bored housewives from all over the South were down in the border towns buying up all the Mexican wedding dresses and piñatas in the world and getting laid at night by the hunters.