When she leaves, I can't look at my mother for a moment, and busy myself by checking out the customers and the setting. It's no longer Spanish New Mexico, which is how both Tucumcari and Santa Fe feel. Gallup bills itself as the heart of Indian country, and it's true. Around us in the booths are Indian faces, young and old, fat and thin. The soft murmur of Indian accents, which are not the same as Spanish, fills the air. I close my eyes and listen to it, thrilling to the up and down cadence. I should have told those Irish girls to come to Gallup. I should bring Jack here. He would love it. This is the Indian west, which for him holds an almost mystical significance.
“When we came here when Gypsy and I were little,” I say, “she decided this was the center of the communications from the stars.”
“What do you mean?”
I'm relieved that she's not going to push me about the other subject. “You get the delusions, right? Or hallucinations or whatever. Gypsy's world?”
“Not really. I mean, I know she thinks she's Indian or Spanish. I know she has that weird thing about never cutting her hair and she has your language. Is there some key to it all?”
I blink. “You really don't know?”
“How would I know? She doesn't talk to me when she's delusional.”
“Well, it's quite cohesive and complete. Like a whole world with unbreakable rules. There's like a confederation of people in the galaxy who use Earth as a sort of airport and message center. There are a lot of people who live here among us, and they use crosses to communicate.” It's hard to say this with a straight face, and my nostrils quiver as my mother starts to blink. “Don't make me laugh. I know it sounds ridiculous, but to her, it's totally real.”
She lifts a hand, palm out, shakes her head. “I'm not laughing.”
“The extraterrestrials take Indian form, and that's why she likes coming to this part of the country.”
“And the round food?”
I raise my eyebrows. “Earth food. Round planet, round food. It's not good for her.”
My mother starts to chuckle. “So, there are some square planets somewhere or what?” She covers her mouth. “Rectangles?”
A giggle rises in my throat. “I know. Pyramids?”
She does laugh at that, but not in a mean way. “You're right. It all makes sense. Except—” her smile fades. “She used to be so afraid of me when she was delusional.” She taps her unlit cigarette on the ashtray with some irritation. “It doesn't make sense.”
“You're wrong. The first time she was delusional, you betrayed her. Twice.”
“I was the only one who knew she was delusional!” Eldora protests. “I spent weeks trying to get your father to let me take her to the doctor.”
“Not when she was seventeen, Mom. Her first psychotic break was when we made that trip when we were eleven.”
She's no dummy, my mother. I watch clarity blossom in her eyes. She sinks back against the booth, looks toward the open restaurant, blows out a drag. “Of course,” she says quietly.
“I wish,” I say slowly, “that she could just have the good parts of the delusions. It wouldn't hurt anything if she could just believe in this harmless little fantasy, that she was part of an alien race that was superior and smart and so clever they had the whole world fooled.”
“I know.”
The truth is, though, she doesn't stay there. She enjoys it for a little while, and I sometimes think it's the longing for her friendly world that makes her go off the meds. It's just that it ends up getting darker and darker, with assassins coming after her, and evil beasts from other worlds coming through graveyards to suck out her blood. She is still a queenlike figure, but she's wanted by some evil empire. The tortures of the damned await her if they get her.
It's been nearly a month this time. Long enough for the bad guys to be after her. I rub my forehead. “I wish we could find her.”
The waitress brings our coffee. My mother puts her cigarette down and stirs in some Sweet 'N Low. “Do my cigarettes make you sick?”
“Actually, no. It's only that…. chile and meat smell. It's awful.”
“For me, it was perfume. I could not stand the smell of perfume.” She's waving her unlit cigarette around to illustrate her words. “And you know me. I love the stuff.”
“Do you want a light, Mom?”
“Oh, I'll get one in a minute. My lighter died.”
I stir my coffee around and around. “How did you know that I was pregnant?”
She chuckles. “Good God, India, you've been barfing at everything since we left.” Her face goes tender. “And it's not like I don't know you, sweetheart. I could tell something was bothering you for a while.”
I take a breath. “I don't know what to do.”
“What does Jack think?”
“I don't know.”
“You haven't told him?”
“Well, just barely. Just before we left.”
“And he hasn't said anything?”
I duck my head. “I kinda didn't let him. And as I said, we never had any kind of agreement about any of this.”
“I see.”
The handsome Navajo appears at the side of our table and holds out a silver lighter. “Allow me,” he says in a lilting, beautiful voice.
Eldora laughs slightly, a breathless, lovely sound, and lets him light her cigarette. “Thank you.” She transfers her cigarette to her left hand and holds her right out to him. “I'm Eldora.”
“Joseph,” he says. “I won't keep you, but here is my card. Stop on your way out if you like.”
“Thank you.”
He goes back to his place, and it's suddenly clear by the detritus on the table around him that he must own or at least manage the place. As he sits back down, my mother gives me the tiniest smile and just barely winks with the eye away from his side of the table. She passes the card silently across the Formica.
Joseph Tsosie, it says in Art Deco script. Photographer.
Only my mother. But for once it doesn't irk me. “Good for you.” Feeling generous and not a little curious, I say, “Now will you tell me your Las Vegas tale?”
“Not here, sweetie.” She cuts her eyes toward the Indian man.
“Ah, okay. At dinner, then?”
She bows her head for a minute, taps her thumbnails together. “Sure.”
My good mood dissipates as we pull up in front of the homeless shelter. Gallup has come a long way in the last few years, trying to improve its image, but the truth is, there are still a lot of alcoholics lying around the hidden places of the town, and on the roads spidering out to the outlying Indian lands.
The casinos along the road here are sort of shiny and positive and forward-thinking. In Gallup, where white and Indian dreams clash, you feel the losses. The Navajo were brilliant with peach orchards, but the Spanish burned them, and God knows you can't grow a peach tree on the high desert. These are lands nobody wanted, so they gave them to the Indians.
Somehow I can feel that bloody past here.
Under the lowering sky, the homeless shelter looks squat and depressed. A wind has whipped up, too, pushing discarded cans and scraps of paper across the pavement. A man as skinny as a straw, in a greasy corduroy coat, bends his shoulders against the gusts, his long gray-and-blond hair blowing in his face as he tries to smoke. I worry about the hair catching fire.
Eldora gets some extra packs of cigarettes out of the trunk and gives one to the man at the door. There is such a vacancy in his eyes that she doesn't even ask about Gypsy just gives out the cigarettes and keeps walking. I think with surprise that she would be good at working the shelters. There's no judgment in her.
Inside, it's the same story as all the others. A layer of grime that comes from too many unwashed and uncared-for people coming through the doors day after day after day, sour smells of things rotting, not enough volunteers to cover everything no matter how many appear. The person we talk to is a young woman, earnest and not yet lost to despair. She hasn't been at the shelter long, so s
he has not met Gypsy in the past.
She does know Loon, however. A shadow crosses her face before she can hide it. “Loon. A Sioux, right?”
“Yeah.”
She exchanges a look with a girl working on a clipboard of forms. “He's been here quite a bit. We have trouble with him, frankly. He has flashbacks and they make him dangerous.”
I blanch. My mother takes my arm. “Never mind, honey. You can't change it. You'll let us know if Gypsy shows up?”
The woman nods. “Sorry,” she says to me.
There's no way to take away the fear her comments have stirred. And as we step out into the day, it's also plain that we're not going any farther tonight. Thick snow is swirling out of the sky, a second front in as many days. In April! Much as I'd love to just get to freaking Las Vegas and have this road trip done, the miles across Arizona are desolate and underpopulated and I'm not about to get stranded in a blizzard out there.
“Damn this snow!” I say.
“There's no help for it. Let's just get a room.”
We get rooms at the El Rancho. It's a quaint little hotel in the middle of the desert, famous for once being home to movie stars on location. There are antelope and deer heads on the walls, along with wagon wheel accents and the ubiquitous Indian print fabrics, but I have to admit I rather like it. My mother and I both head for naps. I unpack, sorting dirty clothes from clean, lying the dwindling underwear in neat piles in the top drawer. In the bathroom, I close the door and brush my teeth and leave the toothbrush out on the sink to air-dry More hygienic.
I fire up my computer in the quiet of my room and check e-mail. It's an agonizingly slow connection, and I only look over the list for an e-mail from [email protected]. There's nothing. I post a quick paragraph on my blog about our trip and turn off the computer.
Next, I call my answering machine at home and I'm electrified when the voice-mail robot says, “You have two new messages. Press one to hear your messages now.”
“India!” says my sister's voice, breathless and manic. It sounds like she says, “Garble barbell garble gobble bobble barbell.” She starts to cry, but keeps talking, still in the mysterious language. At the end, she says in English, “Call me.”
“How?” I ask the recorded message. “How can I call you, Gyps?” I save the message and listen to the next one. It's from the man at the Espanola homeless shelter. “This is Ramón Medina. Your sister showed up again tonight. I tried to get her to stay so we could call you, but she grew agitated and delusional and we had to let her go. I did tell her that you and her mom were looking for her, but she wouldn't stay. Sorry.”
Damn.
I hit the code to play the saved messages on my voice mail. Both of the messages Gypsy left for me in the twin language are there. The happy one I received before Eldora and I left Colorado Springs, and the one from today or last night or whenever she left it.
Pressing the button to replay them, I close my eyes and listen very carefully. Maybe there is some clue I've missed, some secret I can unravel, that one single bit of code that will make it all miraculously clear.
I do it over and over, not trying to grab anything, just letting the syllables play over my mind. And suddenly, there are wisps of things. A jolt of almost and then another.
Maybe it's being on the road like this, remembering when we watched all those television shows. A blip of a television commercial runs through my memory, “I'm a pepper, you're a pepper, he's a pepper,” and it runs into a rhythm that almost takes me down a lane I know. I reach for it, feel the red gravel beneath my feet, smell rain coming from the west: We are walking near the Garden of the Gods, long before there were sidewalks built there.
I'm a pepper you're a pepper he's a pepper …
Holding the phone close to my ear, I stand up and pace as far as the phone cord will allow me to go, humming under my breath, pressing the code to hear Gypsy's message again. It does sound like Spanish in a way, a softness to the syllables, but as I listen, I realize it's just the lilt, the up and downness, an imitation Spanish accent, like the tune of a song with words that you don't know.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers …
I can see us walking, kicking gravel. The mountains, burly on the horizon, the sky lowering with a coming thunderstorm, the smell of damp sandstone.
Red rocks, red road, red room, red shoes.
For a minute, again, it nearly comes through. I almost have the code.
Then it's gone, as abruptly as if my brain has slammed a drawer shut. I'm left listening to the sound of my sister weeping in fear and loneliness, speaking a language I have betrayed her by forgetting.
The last thing I have to do is call Jack at his office, but his secretary says he's already gone home. When I try his house, he isn't there, and listening to the phone ring at the other end, seeing that phone sitting on the counter of his apartment kitchen, makes me feel even more lost and hollow. New York seems a million miles away. I touch my belly with the flat of my palm and remember lying on the floor at the foot of my sister's bed in a hotel room in Santa Fe thirty years ago, and I just want to cry and cry and cry.
Trouble is, crying doesn't help anything. As I lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling, I wonder where in the world I can find someone to help me decipher my sister's language. Somewhere, someone can help, I just know it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Eldora, 1959
There is still so much I have to tell India, and I'm not sure how to do it. What I want to keep to myself, what I have to face on my own without including her, what I need to tell her so she'll understand the whole business.
We're both sick to death of hamburgers and such things so we go to the supermarket and pick up some fruit, cheese, and bread and bring them back to the hotel. There's a nice little sitting area by a fire and we spread out there. We pretty much have the place to ourselves anyway. There's snow. It's the middle of the week. Not yet tourist season.
“I kinda like this spot, really,” I tell India, looking around.
“It's famous enough.”
“You should write a Web page about Route Sixty-six,” I say, wrapping a piece of turkey around an olive. “Talk about all the good places to stay.”
She lifts a shoulder and the opposite eyebrow, the quintessential India gesture. “I've been describing our trip on a blog I keep.”
“What is that?”
“A sort of public diary. I don't write anything personal, just my travels and experiences as a Web designer.” She gives me that wry smile. “It's très hip, you know.”
“You'll have to let me read it.”
“Doubtful.” It's not mean, just straightforward. I can appreciate that.
If I haven't said so, I would just like to say I purely love this woman's face. The dark eyes, the arched flying eyebrows, the strong, generous mouth. She's vividly, vibrantly beautiful, and the pregnancy has given her a zesty look. “Are you feeling a little better this evening?”
“Some.” She dips cauliflower in ranch dressing. “Tell me about going to Las Vegas now.”
A rumble of choices goes through my stomach. Maybe this was all a stupid idea. Maybe she doesn't really need to know it all, just the parts about—
No. Without all of it, she'll never understand the pieces I've got to tell her, now that she's pregnant.
“All right.” I tuck my feet up under me and begin.
The first time I went to Las Vegas, I was home. It was like somebody made up a city just for me. I went with a couple of girlfriends, secretaries who flew in on weekends to hang around the casinos, and we arrived on the strip just after dark. You've seen a thousand pictures. You know all about it.
But I didn't.
It was noisy and hot, and there were crushes of people, all dressed up and a little too bright, as if they were trying to match the blaze of neon. I'd grown used to fancy cars and glamorous-looking people in Hollywood, but Las Vegas was like a musical where at any minute the people would burst into
song and dance. I stood there in a borrowed cocktail dress, wishing for a pair of ruby slippers to dance me over the stage sets.
Instead, I sashayed through the open doors at the Sands. It was the moment my real life began. I had that feeling in my chest. This was why I'd left Elk City.
For rich carpet stretching through a glittering room full of people and light and cocktail waitresses in tiny uniforms that showed lots of skin and leg. For the noise of slot machines clanging, and the sound of money falling, and gamblers shouting curses or cheers. For the smell of dreams and sweat and bourbon, for perfume coming off the gleaming hair of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. For feathers and furs and diamonds, for the ruby velvet on the walls and the ruby shine of rings and the ruby-rich voice of cocktail singers. For cards shuffled and dreams drawn and broken in a second.
I wandered around with a cocktail in my hand—I was only seventeen, but I knew how to look a lot older—and soaked it all up. It had been eight months since I'd left Elk City, and I was ready for a change.
Cliff wasn't cruel or stupid or mean, which a lot of men are. He set me up in Hollywood, just as he promised, and I only saw him about once every couple of months when he'd drive in and act out his fantasies, which made him feel so bad, and usually consisted of something mild, like having me wear an old blouse he could rip open to show my breasts. Or having me wander around the apartment fixing us a meal wearing ordinary clothes but no underwear. He was absolutely miserable doing it, all of it, but he couldn't stop. Sometimes he'd cry about his wife and all the wrong he was doing her, then he'd have me again. I just put up with it. He'd held up his part of the bargain. I upheld mine. I never complained. I petted his head when he was weepy and did what he asked.
In the meantime, I made friends here and there, and did what I could to see about getting into the movies, though I have to tell you that what was absolutely gorgeous in Elk City wasn't much better than ordinary in Hollywood, California.
I never went back to L.A. That night, I wandered over to a craps table, just to watch the action, and there were men gathered around it who had the same look in their eyes as the men who used to stop in Dina's café, but I was older now. I knew a little bit more about what made folks tick. I'd learned that look in their eye was, plain and simple, figuring out that they'd die without doing half of what they wanted or thought. They'd figured out they weren't as mighty as they'd believed they would be.
Lady Luck's Map of Vegas Page 20