The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  He felt a new freedom in the hard labor and liked the diversity of houses he tiled and felt a relief to be away from the smell of death. And the new skill brought him into contact with other people of the trade, and the house on Grant Street soon bulged with a new set of ambitious friends. Soon plans for a linoleum store of his own burst into consciousness, and John and a new friend, Jeff Coleman, began the day-to-day chores of establishing a small business.

  The day the store opened seemed miraculous and strange to Maggie; the family now had ownership of something other than the house. She belonged to the store as the store belonged to her father, and she went there after school now, rather than home, sneaking then next door to the hatchery where hundreds of chicks made their way into the world each day, tended by an old man who liked her company.

  Zihuatanejo

  On the off-white walls of this dream she kept dreaming, the world seemed greener: cold cash, green-backa dollars, a table of money, how much? half, halfa million, halfa what? a dream? nightmare? leaf green? green tea? What green did she dream on these off-white walls? She put the dream away and made it go away. Was this a dream? The off-white walls inside her own skull spun like a top, the off-white walls of the mercado smudged into reality: a tongue gave her the raspberry from the meat counter. She raspberried back; she’d no ancient tale to tell, not then, not yet, ancient evenings and all. She moved back and forth in front of the market: too warm she let the sweater slip off her arms; too cold, she’d pull it back; too nervous, she’d smoke; too pretty, she’d smile; too annoyed, she’d pout; too anxious, she’d chill. If she’d a kitchen she’d would’ve bought stuff, chiles and chocolate, anchos and chipotles, she would’ve bought lots of stuff, stuff to stuff in tortillas with queso and salsa, but she didn’t want to cook, not at all, and she just wanted what she wanted and she wanted Felipe to arrive and she wanted that to happen right now this very moment. Get this show on the road. Whose show? Maggie’s show, now and then, again and again. A cache of cash. Health and bones, something Norse and brooding even in Mexico where it should be light and casual. Is that the way Mexico should be? Sure. Sure it is. What about cash and health? What did they cost? The Norse brooding lived on the off-white walls inside the bone of an off-white skull reflecting light like some wayward kaleidoscope throwing colour on off-while walls for effect? charm? a slight reason? Mystery oozed under the dark-iris of skull, a swarm of insects, some metamorphosis, the slight wing of butterfly, stigma, stigmata.

  Midnight’s broken toll …

  CHAPTER 2

  THE DENSE SMOKE SPREAD, afloat of nicotine and whiskey, a shooter of dark chance, the flur, flur, flur of a shuffling deck of cards, the slap slap slap of the deal: John Morrison discarded an eight and a three and a two, but kept the pair of jacks: the men in the room in the back of Morrison’s linoleum store were light hearted, and then, as the hours passed the room seemed more harsh: the cracks on the wall spread like a fine and intricate web, and John’s chips rose and fell like surging waves: a strange and foreboding feeling seemed in his bones, as if his bones might break by the sheer weight of these moments, as if the pressing smoke would suffocate him right there in his very own store. And then the release: two aces, two tens. His chips grew to a large mound and he relaxed, content, decided. Flur, flur, flur, a reshuffled deck slapped its way onto the table: the men keen, intense with whiskey and luck. John cracked the cap on another beer, and poured a whiskey back shot, and tilted his head for the strong swig: sweating a bit now, unable to leave, unable to go home with the pile of chips before him: he played on and on: he cracked out a fresh deck for luck and threw it on the table. Jeff, his partner, chewed the end of a cigar, the smoke keen and pungent. Later in the wee hours then, with the last of the money lingering in a few small chips, John swaggered another bet onto the table: all in. The cards had always been good to him, always, eventually, they sprang back: always. And so it was, kings and eights: he scooped up the generous pile of chips. Unbeatable, lucky, he waged more and more each hand. Another Swede, Jack Sorenson, leaned against the wall and watched.

  Sometimes dreams release in small almost unseeable increments, small losses accumulate over years and years, so the losing seems less, even though the accumulations of loss in one small life equal immense proportions, losses tangle with reality and compromise raises a wicked head making loss bearable, even noble, almost sensible: this happens in all lives from beginning to end, and so it would have been here: perhaps the prior show of luck may not have even lasted, but John would never know; as the next hand fluttered to the table, a sheering pain shot through John Morrison’s gut. The next minute, he collapsed, and then minutes after that he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. An ulcer in his stomach had burst, and by the time he struggled home, the business was lost.

  On the way home from the hospital, the warm night could not cheer him; he felt cold and terse like a field of Norse snow, the pain rose from the bottom of his stomach and hurt worse than the surgery. His disappointment in his own body raged inside him; once home he hobbled to the car himself and headed toward the deep groves. He needed solace. He drove back into the old roads, punched the gas of the old car that struggled by the flickering moonlit groves of trees until he found a dirt road leading deep inside, somewhere dark, like his soul, somewhere lost, like his heart, somewhere black and seemingly cruel. He felt like a fragment of himself, like sorrow itself, somewhere near the center of chaos where dreams are lost and never found. An owl cooed from a tall tree and a sudden warm breeze dried the sweat on his brow. He looked above to the ungracious moon, and remembered it would rise again tomorrow, and then again, and again, and then every night after that and somehow they would all survive, and that a store, after all was just a store.

  And so, he gathered himself together like a broken toy, put his broken heart on the seat of the old Ford, whole, still beating, put his frazzled disbelieving brain next to the heart still beating, put his own unbelievable presence there too. And wound the old Ford back through the red-rutted earth of his past dreams, back and back, when possibility still lingered, he drove and drove, back into the reality of his ailing body, back through the sultry citrusy groves to his new life with a failing body that had betrayed him.

  A long time after her father stopped dancing, and just before he became ill, Maggie’s independent nature flowered: still the light of the household, she became more aware of her pivotal spot within the family. And she used this information to further her career as Maggie. She barely knew the people that had moved into the Victorian after Mr. Coe died. Mrs. Fergeson had been dead for years, but the thorned pyracantha still strangled the walk across the way when John Morrison got sick: the ulcer had eaten away most of his stomach so the doctors finished the job, removing the massive wound; he had nothing of his own father’s, nor his wife’s, nor his daughter’s stubbornness. John, kind and gentle, seemed at odds with the world around, and that, combined with his own self-punishing ways, became another part of his loss. During surgery, his heart stopped, but the surgeons revived him.

  Maggie felt, even at sixteen, she should be able to do something for him. Be able to save him. Yet, she certainly wasn’t a surgeon. She could only love him, yet that wasn’t enough, was it? Or was it? What if he had died when he died? She wondered what would have happened then. And what was death? How would his death have affected her life? What part of her? Her heart? How much of it? Did this always happen? Was there really life after death? Always? She didn’t think so. Not for one simple moment did she believe that.

  At home she tried to hold her breath for three minutes but couldn’t do it; she felt the loss at ten seconds, and at fifteen she was panicky, and at eighteen she opened her mouth and took a large breath of fresh clean air, pulling fresh deep inside her. She breathed and breathed. She sucked air into her lungs and shuddered at the thought of not having it. The next weeks she walked around very consciously conscious of her breath. She found nourishment in the air moving in and out and in and out an
d in and out.

  Her father’s brief death had brought a new dimension to her own life; the thought of not having him created a vague sort of dissociation, as if the death had been actual; she felt he had been reborn and could not imagine why he didn’t seem to feel it himself. She went to the hospital often; day after day his body refused to heal and day after day she would walk down the cold tile halls of the hospital to his side. She would invent stories about activities at school to please him yet he became distracted easily and his thoughts drifted away to some past she could not share. And his words no longer seemed to have a destination; they wandered from one thing to the next, without focus, little tramps that jumped any train of thought just for the ride. But his gentle nature still infused the family, and this simple kindness born of loss seemed a token or talisman or stigma: something burned into the nature of the family like a brand, the pressure burning. She worked and cleaned and ironed for her mother during this time, but she could not make the trouble go away, she could not press out the wrinkled life of the family. She drifted away from the tense days creating other imaginary worlds for herself, as if she had been strapped down on her father’s gurney, as if it were she that kept rolling away from herself in the long plain hospital corridor, rolling away, disappearing behind stainless steel doors of an emergency room that kept swinging shut behind her, as if her own chest had been slit open, bringing her to another life, as if she were caught in a sentence her thoughts wouldn’t think. She could only escape it in her mind, and sometimes she escaped with Joey Mendoza.

  For Maggie, real life began when she slipped out the front door, across the small wooden porch, down the steps, across the fresh-clipped lawn she had just mowed, and slipped onto the leather seats of Joey’s lowered ’50 Ford. She scrunched next to the young quarterback with dark skin, his arms like the branches of the trees she grew in, the intoxicating warmth of male skin new and exciting: the dark arms that held her seemed as familiar as childhood, and the young man himself, a sanctuary, yet new and mysterious. The pipes on the Ford purred a deep sound as they drove away from the small house into their larger, stronger, hopeful world of youth and music. Their destination: the remote streets of the palm-lined groves. This is where the young gathered in the sultry nights of Maggie’s childhood; lowered Chevys and Fords and Oldsmobiles with chromed-pipes and deep-voiced engines lined the street-sides of the Redlands groves, their radios blasting: Splish, Splash I was takin’ a bath, long about a Saturday night. A-rub-dub, just relaxing in the tub, thinking everything was alright.

  The boys leaned against their cars, pulling the girls into them, or fast dancing to the sound of the 1950s, under the staggering California stars, in the midst of the flowering orange trees, the smells of orange blossoms and earth mingled with the intoxicating smells of English leather and Chanel #5 and White Shoulders, if one could afford it. Maggie would pinch an orange blossom and squeeze it behind her ear: the orange scent of childhood embedded like permanent ink. After the street dance, they’d find a lone dirt road somewhere along the way home, and Joey would drive the Chevy carefully over the ruts, taking great care, slowly, slowly, deeper and deeper, into the foliage of the great trees. Then Joey would hand her a beer slipped into a brown paper bag, smiling his deep boyish grim and pull her close, curling his fingers around the back of her neck, like she belonged to him alone, but Maggie always belonged to her own selves first, and others came along somewhere after that. Then he’d move his brown arm around her, swallowing the whiteness and light, and infusing her with unwelcome seed. The pregnancy startled her, amazed that something else inhabited her body aside from her own selves: she could not allow the thought of pregnant to mature to infancy. She could not grow the idea into a reality; she would not let the idea of it live. If she didn’t have the right words for it, she could erase it: it would no longer be a pregnant word, would it? But the pregnancy was written with indelible ink. What does one do with a pregnancy at 16? Marry it? She’d thought less about marriage than anything else in the entire world: it staggered her that this idea, marriage, even occupied the minds of her friends. What then? she’d ask her troubled mind? What then? She’d seen herself detached from things, not a part of them, and this pregnancy attached her to Joey Mendoza more than to anything: a part of him grew inside her. Incomprehensible. Unbearable. This wasn’t her life, was it? What was she? A poet? A priestess? A pirate? Perhaps a young goddess, but not yet a woman who wished a child: this child growing now. Because she’d thought little of marriage, she’d thought less of children; aside from the noise of her younger brother, she’d spent little time with them. Pregnancy belonged to the world of her mother, not Maggie. Marry Joey? Unthinkable. Unthinkable until this pregnancy invaded her body: snatched her carefree self from itself. Today not tomorrow is where Joey lived in her life, and now he lived in some yesterday, as he’d compromised tomorrow. When good girls got pregnant, they got married, didn’t they? Did good girls get pregnant? Was she ever good? Was the good girl gone now? Good had been there when she wasn’t pregnant, and good seemed carefree, unpregnant, and attached to the cares of girls, not women. Private and safe from pregnancy. Where do gone girls go that aren’t quite so good? She seemed good. She always had seemed good. She knew that even at sixteen. But one couldn’t say whether she was good or not, could they? They only thought they could. And Maggie was thinking now, and thinking and thinking about who she might be, and who might be in it, inside and out.

  Joey Mendoza was unable to think himself out of the dilemma of the child growing inside Maggie. He, too, thought only of today. Joey had a football scholarship in mind for his future; the pregnancy and its implications seemed unthinkable too. This pregnancy of Maggie’s seemed an ending to him, not a beginning. They weren’t even married. In relationship to life as he wanted to live it, Maggie’s pregnancy signified a death. He was too young to die. How could he live with his share of this shame? What would he do now?

  “Damn it, Maggie!” he slammed his down hand on the hood of the white Chevy. She suddenly looked less pretty, he thought, her young face red from the tears, her blouse rumpled and drab.

  “I’m not happy either,” she said, feeling angry and hurt.

  This upheaval in her life was nothing like her father’s temporary death. She felt this great change every second she breathed. Something’s happening now. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

  Yet, curiously, everything else seemed unchanged.

  The blossoms of orange still suffocated the smell of air, and there beyond the grove where they spoke, the spindly palms reflected in the texture of a resevoir, the pond’s liquidy mosses thick from the heat. She watched a dragonfly skim the surface haphazardly, yet its flight seemed directed as if randomness was not only a part of its genetic past, but cast in its present and future as well. The dragonfly skittered over the water, diving perilously close to the surface, skimming the mossy gloss of the water, its orange reflection following from the dark green below. She watched the flight until the image disappeared into shadowy water. It seemed as if the thousands of teenage afternoons were still unchanged in this oasis hidden in a Southern California canyon, beyond the cities and towns, beyond the deep rows of orange, back into a wilderness tangled with ivies, and streams and water tumbling from a secret mountain home over rocks, down slopes, seeking the pollen-dusted pond overgrown with reeds and willows, swarming now with dragonflies and Maggie. But the dark canopy of trees no longer protected her from the outside world. The dark green sultry shaded days were over, and she knew it.

  “Maybe we should get married,” said Joey unconvincingly.

  “Do you want a baby?” she asked.

  “No, no, I don’t. My parents want me to go to college.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said, suddenly feeling something like shame. And the shame was not of sex, which might have been her mother’s idea of shame, but she couldn’t be certain of that, not really, but the shame of consequence, which was her idea of shame, shameful because she had not thought
carefully enough. She thought herself free from the consequence of action, free as free could be because she was Maggie, she could not be caught in unwanted pregnancy. She had not looked for consequence, but escape, and somehow the escape had a consequence she’d never dreamed of, and there seemed no escape now because of the consequence of seeking it. She no longer felt like a girl, but she knew she was not yet a woman.

  “How could you let this happen, Maggie?”

  “Seems like you had something to do with it,” she snapped.

  “Yeah, yeah.” He looked into the trees.

  “I don’t want to get married, I don’t want you to be pregnant. I don’t.” He slammed his fist down on the hood of the car.

  “So it’s my baby, not yours, is that it?”

  “Hey girl, it’s not my body.”