This was worse somehow than the anger. Anger Steve could deal with; anger he was used to. But fear and sadness were not emotions that were comfortable for either of them, and he looked down helplessly at his father’s lost expression.
“What happened? Steve?”
Before he could come up with a response, the old man faded out, like the tuner on a broken radio wandering off station. His father frowned at him, then smiled and said clearly, “Lifestyle fax puppy.”
“This is an example of what I was talking about,” the doctor said. “And as time passes, those moments of coherence are going to become fewer and farther between. As I said, medication will not cure him or make him better, but it may be able to preserve for a little while longer such periods of lucidity. If you have a few minutes, I’d like you to come to my office so I can give you some literature on the subject and outline treatment options that you can discuss with your mother before we make any decisions on our next course of action.”
Nodding, Steve followed the doctor out of the room and down the corridor.
He drove home after nightfall, and was grateful for the traffic jam. He didn’t want to go back to his apartment yet, didn’t want to call his mother or talk to Sherry, and he sat in the darkness, listening to the radio, hands on the steering wheel, staring out at the sea of red brake lights as his Toyota moved gradually north, carried along by the slow flow of bumper-to-bumper cars.
Two
Leaving New Mexico
She awoke after Albuquerque, stirring to life on the seat next to him. The desert was dark, the sky moonless, and in the dim illumination of the dashboard her face seemed to be glowing, greenly luminescent. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Almost to Santa Fe.”
“Are we going to stop?”
“Yeah. I’m tired. I need to crash.”
“Wake me when we get there.”
She was asleep again in a matter of minutes, sinking back into the blackness of the seat, and for that he was grateful. Two weeks ago, she’d seemed the ideal traveling companion, always light, always cheerful, up for anything, but that sort of shallow enthusiasm wore thin quickly, and she now seemed to him more irritating than pleasant. He liked to drive in silence, liked to look at the land and be alone with his thoughts, but she needed noise, and if the radio wasn’t on, she filled the silence with her own chatter. The only time he seemed able to get any peace was when she was sleeping.
He glanced into the rearview mirror, saw the lights of Albuquerque even from this far away. There were too many people in the world, he thought. The open spaces were closing. As a child, he remembered seeing a factory in his neighborhood torn down, remembered seeing grass grow through the asphalt and eventually take over the property. There’d been something reassuring about the fact that nature could reclaim its territory, but he no longer had faith that that could occur. Nature had been beaten down too well and for too long. It no longer had the strength or will to fight back. It had lost the war and knew it and it had given up the game, deciding to shut itself down.
That depressed him, and he was glad Suzie was asleep so he could think in silence.
He pulled off at the first Santa Fe exit and drove down the overdeveloped street until he hit a motel with a Vacancy sign. Suzie still slept, and he left her in the car as he walked into the lobby, not waking her until he returned with a room key.
In the room, she took off her clothes, crawled into the bed and instantly fell asleep. He was disappointed. He’d been half hoping for sex, but she was obviously too tired, and he went into the bathroom and took a shower and masturbated.
He was awake after the shower, no longer sleepy, and he crawled in bed next to her and used the remote atop the nightstand to turn on the TV. She instinctively snuggled next to him, burying her face in his armpit, throwing a clutching arm around his midsection, making him wish he’d waited for sex. She wouldn’t’ve minded being awakened that way, he thought, taken in her sleep. She probably would’ve liked it.
He flipped through the cable channels, stopping when he reached an old Jack Lemmon movie with an actress who looked remarkably like his ex-wife. He watched the movie for a while, losing himself in its featherweight plot, but then a commercial came on, breaking the spell, and he leaned back into the pillow, closing his eyes. He found himself wondering where Phoebe was now, whom she was with, what she was doing. She had to be happier than she’d been with him.
He was certainly happier.
They’d lived on a cul-de-sac on the edge of Phoenix in a subdivision with small, identical houses with small, identical yards. It was a low-rent neighborhood, and the houses hadn’t come with lawns. Even after two years, most of their neighbors hadn’t bothered to plant grass, and patches of unkillable weeds grew in the sun-hardened clay of the untended yards. The driveways of the houses surrounding theirs were permanently littered with the broken toys of dirty children. A cop lived next door, and he and his wife had screaming midnight arguments at least once a week, arguments that always ended with the cop hopping on his motorcycle and taking off in the middle of the night.
That had been their neighborhood, and the frightening thing was that they’d belonged there. So they’d gotten divorced one day, not so much because they hated each other but because they hated their life together. They’d sold the house and he had moved on to Denver and Missoula and Cheyenne, and she had gone . . . God knew where.
He thought about those days sometimes and he wondered what would have happened had they stayed together, had they stayed in that neighborhood. Would he have begun beating her? Would she have stabbed him to death while he slept one night? One of the two, he assumed. Things could not have gone on as they were without violence erupting somehow.
The movie came back on but he could not get into it again, and he drifted into sleep thinking about Phoebe and Phoenix and the cop next door.
Morning. A New Yorker in the stairwell, lugging down a genuine Santa Fe Indian ladder made in the Philippines. Tangible proof that he’d been out to the Wild West. Where was he going to put it? In his New York Ethan Allen living room?
He felt superior to the New Yorker, and part of him wanted to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the struggling man, but instead he held open the stairwell door and watched with a growing sense of depression as the man thanked him profusely and awkwardly carried the ladder to his car. Farther down the parking lot, a couple was loading a giant Indian pot into their trunk, and that depressed him even more. What would they tell their friends when they returned home? How would they describe their trip? They were at a Motel 6. Across the street from Denny’s. Next door to McDonald’s. Would they embellish the location in their conversations? Rearrange the landscape of the town to fit their conception of a perfect trip? Gush about the wild beauty of Santa Fe?
He checked out, grabbing some free coffee from the pot in the lobby, filling the Styrofoam cup only halfway so he wouldn’t spill it as he walked back up the stairs to the room. Suzie was up and dressed, zipping up her suitcase on the bed, wearing white shorts and a white top, her blond hair in a ponytail.
“Tennis, anyone?” he said.
She laughed, took it as a compliment though it wasn’t meant as one, and he made one last check of the room to make sure they’d gotten everything, before picking up the suitcase and walking out with her to the car.
They stopped at a fast-food restaurant called Happy Posole and bought breakfast burritos, which they ate on red plastic chairs at a red plastic table under a red plastic umbrella.
It was nearly ten when they hit the highway, but they were in no hurry, and they took their time, driving the back road to Taos. The sky was as he remembered it: deep blue with massive white clouds that stretched to infinity in all directions. The Sangre de Cristos were beautiful, the tips of the mountains covered with snow, and they stopped by the side of the road to take a picture. Suzie also wanted her picture taken in front of a wind-carved pillar of sandstone where two other couples were already posing
for snapshots. They pulled onto the shoulder, waited in the car until the other people had taken their photos and left; then Suzie ran across the road, twirled, arms extended, and he turned the camera on its side and took the picture.
They got into an argument at El Santuario de Chimayo, an old Spanish church that was home to “miracle dirt,” which was supposed to possess healing powers and cure illnesses. The small dusty parking lot was full when they arrived and the narrow unpaved road leading up to it was lined with cars, an uneasy mob of Hispanic believers and white tourists trudging toward the church in a single-file mass.
The church itself was small and crowded, and they went in together, but he started feeling claustrophobic and had to walk outside. She was angry when she emerged from the chapel, and though he wasn’t sure why, he didn’t care enough to ask. It would end up being something he’d done, or something he hadn’t done, and he wasn’t in the mood to apologize to her for things entirely unintentional.
They got into it anyway on their way back to the car, she claiming that he hadn’t held her hand in the church when she’d offered it to him, he explaining that he hadn’t seen her hold her hand out, she saying that that was the problem, he didn’t pay enough attention. It was a stupid argument, but as always they fought as if their lives depended on it, neither of them backing down, the subjects they each brought up careening further and further afield until they were yelling at each other over the hood of the car about something he’d said in Wyoming four days ago that she’d been too polite to mention.
Neither won but neither would give in, and it was a stalemate as they both got into the car.
They did not speak until the road started down the moun tainside toward Taos; then she put a hand on his leg, said, “Let’s not fight,” and snuggled next to him on the seat. He allowed his cheek to be kissed, and then everything was all right, and she started talking about the small villages and verdant valleys through which they’d passed, sharing with him the bottled-up thoughts and observations she’d been unable to express during their silent drive.
He tuned her out, ignored her, concentrated on driving.
Taos hadn’t really grown, but it was much more crowded than the last time he’d been here. There was a permanent traffic jam on the highway that doubled as the town’s main drag, and as they sat unmoving behind an olive Mercedes, a seemingly endless parade of middle-aged women wearing oversize sunglasses and clownishly exaggerated Southwest clothing walked past on the faux-Western sidewalk.
“I thought it would be bigger,” she said.
He shook his head.
“It’s a small town.”
“Always has been.”
“I thought it would be bigger.”
Part of him wanted to continue the argument from the church, to get back at her, to hurt her, to point out how inane her observations were, how simple her conversations, but he decided against it, and he did not respond to her statement but waited silently in the traffic, inching the car slowly forward as the shopping pedestrians passed them by.
Suzie stared out the side window, looking away from him. “Pretty soon,” she said, “everyone will do everything through their computers. Shop. Pay bills. Read books. Watch movies. Listen to music. They’ll never have to leave the house.”
He tried to imagine that but could only conjure up in his mind a nation of agoraphobes, paranoid shut-ins who left the road and open spaces to outlaws and psychotics who tooled around in souped-up Road Warrior vehicles. It might be better for the land that way, he reasoned. It would put a stop to the endless building, the parceling of America’s finest locations into condo tracts and time-share resorts. People would remain cloistered in their little living spaces, staring at their computers, leaving the remaining land unspoiled.
Would he be one of the outlaws? One of the computer illiterates still riding the roads and using real money? He thought he would.
Traffic thinned out on the east end of town, and they took the right branch of the road that led to the pueblo. They went on the tour, Suzie paying an extra five dollars so she could take photographs, and a young Indian man led them into a church and around a small square and gave them a brief history of the pueblo and its people and then let them go and moved off to conduct another tour.
Suzie rhapsodized about the pueblo lifestyle and being close to nature and living off the land, but the pueblo to him looked like an unusually small and unusually dirty apartment complex, and the sections of sheets hung in the small windows as curtains and the raggedy-clothed children playing with dusty toys in front of their homes reminded him of Phoenix.
They ate lunch at a small restaurant on the edge of the reservation. The dining room was empty, but there were still uncleared dishes on most of the tables and they were led to a booth next to a window. There was a bug on the dirty glass, a furiously buzzing black-winged creature that looked like nothing he had ever seen, but both the waitress and Suzie pretended that it didn’t exist and he figured that if two women could ignore the bug he could too.
They both ordered Indian tacos—deep-fried dough piled with beans and lettuce and cheese and tomatoes—and he stared past the bug and out the dusty window at the reservation as they ate. He wondered what it would be like to be a member of a conquered race. Did the Indians working at the restaurant resent having to make food for him? Or was it just a job to them? Maybe they’d been conquered so long ago that they didn’t even think about it. He tried to remember if he’d ever seen an Indian man with a white woman or a white man with an Indian woman but couldn’t. It seemed to him that Indians kept to themselves more than other races.
He’d be angry, he decided, if he were Indian. He’d resent having to live by the rules and strictures of the conquering culture.
On the way out, paying the check at the cash register by the door, he asked the waitress if she preferred the term “Indian” or “Native American.”
“Neither,” she said.
“Why?”
“They’re both European terms. We were called ‘Indians’ because Columbus made a mistake and thought he was in India. The word ‘American’ comes from Amerigo Vespucci. Either way, we’re named for Italian explorers. I prefer to think of myself as—” She said some word he’d never heard before and couldn’t make out.
He liked that attitude—it cheered him up for some reason—and he felt good as he walked with Suzie out to the car.
“What was her problem?” Suzie said. “What’s she so angry about?”
“She wasn’t angry,” he said in her defense.
Suzie did not respond, but a few minutes later, in the car, on the road, she said, “Did you think that girl was pretty?”
“Who?” he said.
“The waitress.”
He hadn’t really thought about it, but now that he looked back, she had been attractive. “No,” he said.
They were silent for several minutes.
“It looks like a scene out of a movie here,” she said. “The landscape. It looks fake. Not real.”
He nodded.
“I bet they filmed a lot of movies in this area.”
“Yeah.”
“In the future,” she said, “everyone will be forced to sell the movie rights to their life at birth and be given, like, fifty thousand dollars. Then movie studios or television networks will be able to make movies and TV shows about anything that happens anywhere to anyone and not have to worry about buying the rights to the story and being sued and all of that.”
He glanced over at her. She spent entirely too much time thinking about the future, he decided.
She wanted to stop tomorrow at the Rio Grande gorge before they headed on up into Colorado, and he’d been toying with the half-assed idea of pushing her over the edge. He’d even rearranged their schedule around the idea, telling her that they needed to leave early if they were going to sightsee. In the back of his mind was the idea that there would probably not be any people around to see him push her if they stopped by the gorge
early enough in the morning.
But of course he would not go through with it. Too much trouble. He’d have to drive back to Taos, report that she’d fallen off the bridge, answer questions. He’d probably be responsible for the body and the funeral arrangements too. It was easier to let her live.
The idea appealed to him, though, and he thought again of Phoebe.
Could he have pushed Phoebe over the edge?
Probably.
Would he have regretted it?
No.
They checked in at their motel. The room smelled of Lysol, and the single wrapped glass on the sink counter was speckled with dried white water stains. He turned on the TV, but the only station that came in was an NBC affiliate out of Albuquerque, and the only thing on was a soap opera. The rest of the channels showed static.
He lay on the bed, staring up at the spackled ceiling, while she went into the bathroom and peed with the door open. He saw in his peripheral vision, through the closed translucent outer drapes, the vague silhouettes of children running to the motel pool.
A few moments later she emerged from the bathroom bottomless, obviously in the mood for sex, but he didn’t feel like it and he rolled over and off the bed. “Let’s go swimming,” he said.
She looked at him, puzzled, idly scratching her pubic hair. “What?”
“I want to swim.”
He didn’t wait for her but opened his suitcase, took out his trunks, and went into the bathroom to change, locking the door behind him.
She was completely naked and pulling on her one-piece when he came back out, and he waited for her, holding the towels, and they walked out of the room together.
“You have the keys?” she asked.
He looked back at the closed door. “No.”
She smiled. “That’s okay. I do.” She held up the room key, the ring around her middle finger.
His Father's Son Page 3