Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  “Señora, we saw the girl for the first time this morning about an hour before you did,” the man replied in good English. “Buena suerte. Drive safely.”

  Johanna stood outside the car looking in at Martha, who sat expressionless in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. Martha’s cornsilk hair had not been washed in days and she was thin in the cheeks, dark-lidded, dressed in a navy-blue flower-print dress that sagged around her shoulders and made her look sallow even for a Mennonite. They rode in complete silence to Whites City near the turnoff to Carlsbad Caverns, where Martha spoke for the first time, in Plautdietsch, saying she needed to go to the bathroom. Johanna stopped at a curio shop–diner and made a point of going inside with her.

  Martha refused to have anything to eat. Johanna bought herself a hamburger and a Coke, and after she ate, Martha watched her fix her makeup and lipstick in the rearview mirror. “I bet you’ve never been in a car like this before, have you?” Johanna told her. “It’s new. It’s the first brand-new car we’ve ever had.” Martha made no response and after a few miles back on the road she climbed over the front seat and curled up around her bag in the backseat, mostly to get away from the powerful lingering aroma of the burger. It made her so hungry she was afraid she might be sick, until Johanna lit a cigarette and the smell of tobacco took its place. She fell asleep within minutes, listening to Johanna humming along with a country song on the radio. When she woke it was late afternoon and she was very hot and the sun rainbowed into her eyes through the side window of the car. For a few seconds she couldn’t remember where she was and thought she must be back in Chihuahua, waiting for her father to come home from work. But she sat up to the slowly passing procession of a small, tidy municipal downtown, with a church and a courthouse and a post office and a gas station, all of whose signs were written in English, and she put her head back down and pressed her face into her bag and started to cry for the first time since she’d been taken away.

  THREE

  Sept. 20, 1972

  This was back in December 1970, the winter of the year it happened. I drove into a heavy snow outside of Los Ojos, N.M., in a dealership car, a pristine Canadian-nameplate Pontiac Parisienne that I had stolen off a lot in Albuquerque and realized too late was sitting near empty. I decided to find a place to stop for the night, but by then I could no longer see more than a few feet beyond the hood.

  Something about the way the snowflakes streamed into the cones of the headlights created the sensation that I was moving backward and then it felt like I had lifted off the road and floated up into the low clouds. It was a nice feeling at first, with the heater pumping and the radio picking up a station strong and clear. The windshield wipers thumped, keeping time with the song that was playing, then falling out of rhythm with it, then slowly falling back in:

  I know this time, it’s really over

  For there’s no happiness in store.

  And I will never be the fool I was before.

  No one can call me Mr. Fool no more.

  My tears were scattered, with all the shattered

  Dreams that faded in the past.

  Vows were spoken, vows were broken

  But the last one was the last . . .

  I cracked the window to get some cold air on my face, but I must have drifted off for a second anyway and let the tires wander. The wheel yanked hard to the right and the Pontiac barreled at a precarious angle down into the bar ditch and the tires pounded up in the wells as I plowed through a bank of heavy snow almost as high as the tops of the windows.

  For the better part of an hour I tried to get myself out, rocking it back and forth—D and R, R and D, D and R—a blind game, gaining a little more traction with each try until I could feel the wheels about to grab and haul me back up onto the asphalt. But near the top of one arc I got too eager and gunned it and it fishtailed and fell back. The engine raised a mournful whine and the car settled into a part of the ditch that made the place where I’d been before seem like a tropical paradise. The wheels just spun helplessly now and as I kept trying, the burnt-detergent stench of transmission fluid began to register in my nose; if I didn’t stop I was going to ruin any chance I had of getting it out later.

  I sat still for a while beneath the blanket of snow, listening to the muffled sound of the engine, staring at the red needle lying against the corner of the capital E, wondering how long it would be before I’d have no heat. Earlier that week at the El Don Motel in Albuquerque I’d burgled the room of a farm pesticide salesman from Tucson, who was in town for a convention. The only coat he had packed was a lightweight corduroy dress jacket, which I reached for now, knowing it was seriously unequal to the weather outside the car. I opened his hatbox and took out his hat, a beautiful gray-felt Stetson half a size too big, and clamped it down over my ears. Both doors were packed shut, so I rolled down the window and dug with my bare hands until I had room to squirm out on top of the snow, which swallowed me in great gulps up to my armpits as I fought to get to the road. The snow was still coming down hard and the flurries were heavy. But when I topped the ditch into knee-deep drifts I could see by the orange glow of a roadside light that I’d run off the pavement just short of a rest stop. In the distance I made out a pair of picnic shelters and two garbage cans up on pivot poles, the tops of the cans covered with untouched cylinders of snow that looked like frosted wedding cakes.

  A gust took my hat and I watched it skitter away across the surface of the snow leaving tracks like a small animal. I found it hard to believe that this was the place where I was going to die, out in the snow, like a goddamned Laplander, not back in Texas where I belonged but in a state that couldn’t even come up with an original name for itself.

  Past the rest stop near the tree line I saw something else through the blur—lines of red pinpoints glowing like coals, a pattern my mind recognized but was unable to reveal to me until I thought of the words themselves: cab lights.

  I pulled my chin down into my coat and aimed in their direction. The truck was a red cabover Peterbilt with New Mexico plates and an Oklahoma City address on the passenger side door beneath the legend I.T. ENTERPRISES, SOLE PROPRIETOR. It was idling, pumping a warm diesel smell out into the snow, a wonderful smell, the smell of humanity. I banged hard on the door with the flat of my palm and scooted to the side in case I was dealing with someone who kept a weapon at hand. I waited for what seemed like a week and then I knocked again. Before I had banged twice the door flew open, almost knocking me into the snow, and the beam of a powerful flashlight caught me in the eyes.

  “Where did you come from?” a voice boomed. “Why are you here?”

  I was going to answer the first question but the second one sounded odd and I didn’t know exactly how to respond. I was blinded and the snow was gusting hard into my left ear. The voice repeated itself with greater urgency.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’m really sorry to bother you, mister,” I said. “But I’ve got myself in a bit of trouble. I ran my car off the road over—”

  The voice cut in, threatening: “Are you a friend or an enemy?”

  I raised a hand to deflect the light, and to demonstrate the purity of my intentions. “Well . . . I’m a . . . I’m not a . . . Listen, I don’t mean you any harm. I’m really sorry to’ve come up on you like this in the middle of the night but I just ran my damned car off the road, over past the picnic tables, and it’s stuck down in the gully and I’m nearly out of gas.”

  The flashlight’s brightness caused me to be able to see the veins inside my eyes, which looked like a road map for a place I would never be able to navigate. The beam of the light flickered momentarily past me out into the night, as if the man was searching for my car, or for someone else hiding out in the snow, and then it returned to my face.

  “In other words you’re in need of shelter for the night?”

  “Now, just until the sun comes up. If I could trouble you until then I think I’d be able to get down there and put something u
nder the tires and get it out.”

  I switched hands blocking the glare from the flashlight. “I’m a quiet sort, I promise you. I travel by myself just like you do, you won’t even know I’m in the truck. I’ve got a little money I can give you for your trouble.”

  The flashlight stayed aimed into my eyes during a glacial silence and then the voice said: “Letter to the Hebrews 13, verse 1: ‘Let brotherly love continue.’ And for those in need of a little incentive, there’s verse 2: ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’

  “I won’t take your money,” he said. “Come inside. Pull the door behind you.”

  He switched off the flashlight and through the dazzle still blinding my eyes I saw the vague form of a man withdraw into the darkness of the sleeper cab behind the seats. I beat the snow off my jacket and pulled myself up into the cab and hauled the door shut against the wind.

  “Lord almighty damn, am I grateful to you,” I said, settling into the passenger seat still shivering, smelling the marvelous metallic heat inside the cab. “That storm was on top of me before I knew it. I’m not much of a mountain driver.”

  I breathed into my numbed hands and shoved them into my pockets. “Like I said, you won’t remember I was here as soon as there’s enough daylight to see. I don’t even snore.” He didn’t say anything for a while and I decided I’d said too much already, but he finally cleared his throat and spoke again.

  “Where do you come from, friend?”

  “Over in the Panhandle. Near Lubbock. Where you can see a storm like this coming a month off.”

  “Out in the sticks.”

  “So far out in the sticks there aren’t any sticks.”

  I looked over and saw that he had pulled a pair of pleated curtains partway between us. A radio in the sleeper that had been playing a soft broadcast of a talk show or a soap opera fell silent and I could hear rustling and heavy nose-breathing behind me. I couldn’t make up my mind whether etiquette would be to turn around to address him or if doing so would be a violation of his sanctum. So I just unbuttoned my jacket and sat awkwardly facing the dashboard, looking at a watery reflection of myself in the windshield, past which the world was slowly emptying itself of all color and form.

  “I’d like to apologize for my welcome,” the driver said after a moment. “I’m a little wound up out here tonight.” He spoke in the same polished-quartz tone I’d first heard, a voice that reminded me of a television commercial except for a rough edge to it, a feeling that it had once sounded better.

  He fell silent again and I could hear more huffing and moving around, as if he was wrestling with the bedsheets, struggling to get settled again. Considering the close quarters, I probably should have been more wary of him, but I was still overcome with gratitude, like a man plucked from the surface of the moon.

  “I think I should warn you before you get settled in,” he said, “that I won’t be doing a whole lot of sleeping back here tonight.”

  The direction of his voice seemed to indicate that he wasn’t lying down but had taken up a seated position in his bunk slightly to my left. I imagined him perched there like a Buddha, gazing past the side of my head out the windshield, though it was too dark for me to see any reflection of him in it.

  “I’m not here to rob you,” I said. “I swear I’m not. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  He coughed sharply and suddenly, causing me to jump. “No, it’s not that,” he said. “The problem isn’t you, it’s me. I’ve got a trailer of patio doors that were supposed to be in Las Cruces tomorrow morning, so I availed myself of a little trucker’s help and now I’m sitting here snowed in and it’s holding me captive in its cruel and vigilant grip.”

  Jesus, listen to the way this guy talks, I thought.

  I asked what he had taken.

  “Dexedrine. Four spansules at five-thirty this afternoon. I won’t sleep again until tomorrow night, nor eat. If you get me talking, I’ll take you right into next week. But the devils do more than keep me awake—they lay my senses bare, work a ferocious number on my imagination. I start to feel like my heart’s coming out of my chest. Sometimes I’m filled with fear and sometimes with an unreasonable love for the world.”

  “I don’t need you to go feeling any love for me, you understand?” I told him.

  He made a baritone laugh that dropped down into harmony with the hum of the engine. “What I’m speaking of is a purely spiritual phenomenon, chemically achieved. You’re safe with me. You can relax.”

  “I haven’t relaxed in so long I don’t think I could even remember how,” I told him.

  As he talked I tried to form a mental picture of the driver, my accidental innkeeper, but nothing took shape. From his voice I could rough out his age, probably late fifties, early sixties. He asked my name and I told him the first one that came to mind. When I asked his, he said it was probably better if I didn’t know it—a reversal of the role I customarily played as the cipher in most of these passing acquaintances on the road. He said I should think of him simply as a benefactor that fate had placed in my path.

  He asked my permission to smoke.

  “Can I offer you one, Bob?” This was the name I had given him.

  “I’m trying to quit,” I said, lying for no reason.

  I saw the glow of an electric lighter and little ropes of smoke began to twirl past me and flatten out and fall against the cold of the windshield. In the reflection the end of his cigarette flared and faded, giving me the odd sensation of being able to see someone without being able to see anything.

  I wanted to sleep but I felt I should probably try to be sociable if he was. “Has anybody ever told you you’d make a good preacher?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, Bob, I made a pretty bad one—fifteen and a half years in the pulpit, Southern Baptist,” he said, as if reciting rank and serial number.

  “How’s that for calling it?” I said.

  He didn’t elaborate so I decided to ask the obvious next question: “How’d you get behind the wheel of a rig? That’s not the regular career path for the clergy, from what I’ve read.”

  He exhaled audibly, a bit dramatically. “It’s a sad story, but commonplace, I guess. Maybe sadder because it’s so commonplace.”

  “Listen, I don’t want to stir up any memories for you,” I said—which was true, because I didn’t want to hear any.

  “If you spend as many hours alone as you do in this profession, they stir up all by themselves,” he said. “They’re the only things that help you pass the time—good, bad, neutral, no matter.”

  I told him: “I’m a salesman myself, so I know the feeling.”

  “It’s a lonely life on the road, but a life in the pastorship is lonelier. You wouldn’t think it, would you? You’re surrounded by people. They come to you—smiling, crying, worried, guilty, none of them ever telling you the truth because, God forbid, you might find out who they really are—when who they are rarely turns out to be very damnable, or interesting—and of course none of them have the slightest genuine desire to really know you. You’re just a conduit to something that might mean they’re not going to cease to exist after all. And so when someone comes along who shows the faintest glimmer of interest in you as a person, you latch on like a drowning man.”

  He paused and lit another cigarette. “Are you a religious man?” he asked me.

  “I suppose I’m as religious as most people who make a point of saying they are, which is not particularly.”

  “Considering the fact that I don’t know you from Adam, would you mind if I made a confession?” he asked.

  “Adam who?” I said.

  “Okay, then.”

  He went into a story about a friend he had met in the Army, a man who had also thought about going into the ministry but instead had become a high school ag teacher. The two men had lost touch but eventually ended up in the same western New Mexico town, where the pastor, my truck driver, had taken charge
of a seen-better-days Second Baptist Church and set about trying to turn it around. His friend Mickey married and became involved in the church, serving as a deacon, and the two became close. But then Mickey had some kind of crisis of faith, maybe more of a general breakdown in his life, and he started showing up on Sundays less and less and finally stopped coming to church altogether. His wife, Charlene, a good-looking blond girl from Dallas several years his junior, continued to come, teaching Sunday school, bringing covered dishes for funerals and revivals. Sometimes she would visit the pastor’s office and the two would commiserate about her husband. She would cry and tell him she didn’t know what was happening to Mickey, and he didn’t, either, because Mickey wouldn’t talk to him about it. And then, as if the diagnosis was just the physical confirmation of a horrible fact all three had known for a long time, Mickey found out he was dying of lung cancer; he wasn’t going to make it to forty-five.

  The decline was slow and agonizing. The pastor visited the house every day toward the end, talking to Mickey until Mickey couldn’t hear him anymore. And then one sunny afternoon, while Mickey lay in the other room dying, unhearing, the pastor and Mickey’s wife went to bed together.

  “If I’m going to be honest with you, I’ll tell you that I didn’t feel bad in the least right then. In fact, I had the same kind of feeling I’d always had when I was absolutely sure I was doing something right.”

  They waited six months before they let anyone know they had feelings for each other. They married and had a baby right away. “I could feel the relief in the church, where bachelor pastors are held to be some kind of latent infection,” he said. “Everyone was so happy for us, especially for her.”

  But it all went south inside of a year. They fought every night. She never said it, but he knew she hated him for what he had done to his friend, as if she had played no role. He realized what a horrible mistake he’d made throwing his life in with hers and it shocked him to realize how little a person could actually know about another. He had been blinded to anything he might have known because of the grief he had felt for his friend and what he had done to him.