The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  “Getting lonely here, Maggie,” he complained as he moved from the porch to the car.

  “Hi,” she said as she slid out of the car. He smiled back a large Hank smile. White lightning. “What do you have on your feet?” she asked.

  “Birkenstocks, German,” he answered holding up a foot. “Do you like them?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not really.” She frowned and looked at him a little puzzled.

  “Hey, they are very comfortable and good for your feet. I’ll buy you a pair.”

  “Don’t, please don’t.”

  “Of course I will,” he teased. “You need some of these.”

  “Do you see these?” She looked down at her cowboy boots.

  “Yeah.”

  “I drank a boot full of beer from these boots one night, and I don’t need anything that might not hold a boot of beer.”

  “From those boots?”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t told me that,” laughing now.

  “Didn’t ask.”

  “Well just who would think to ask if you drank beer from your boots?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” she challenged. “Guess it must be just you.” He’d put his arm around her by then and they walked towards the house together.

  “I didn’t think you’d ever get out of Big Bear. What did they say when you quit work?”

  “Oh, you know, they wanted me to stay and all. They sorta thought I was going with you. Is Patrick here yet?”

  “Went down to San Diego. He’ll be back. Did you stop and see your parents?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I did. Oh look. Look at that hawk.”

  “A redtail,” Hank said. “This place is full of them. And sparrow hawks too. Have you ever seen those?”

  She shook her head yes.

  “We’re really doing this, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, we are. We are,” he marveled. “We’ve a whole house here.”

  “I already sorta miss Big Bear. Don’t you? I mean, wouldn’t you have wanted to stay. It’s so beautiful.”

  “Too much trouble, right now. We’re better off here.”

  “I miss the hotel. And Lewis.” She’d already told Hank about leaving Redlands. How her father had been sick for so long, and really hadn’t gotten much better. She didn’t talk about the abortion. She really tried not to think about it, pretending it happened to another girl: the girl from Redlands who wasn’t there anymore. She crumpled that page up and threw it away, as if it belonged to someone else’s story.

  She even pretended not to recognize that part of herself when it rose to consciousness. She’d turn her head like a good Redlands girl, snub it, pretend it didn’t exist.

  Maggie ached to leave Redlands after the abortion.

  When she’d left the small house on Grant Street, she sat in the driveway the longest time. The maroon ’55 Chevy her dad had given her purred, content, yet new adventure awaited: what seemed broken, seemed broken here, she’d thought; if she drove away perhaps she wouldn’t feel broken anymore. And that day, driving up the rugged dirt road in Devore, she felt a certain thrill, the same thrill she’d felt earlier arriving in Big Bear. She pulled the maroon Chevy out the driveway of the Grant Street house and drove down Brookside Avenue to Orange Street and out through the shaggy groves clustering the road at the far end of town. True to its name, the great round trees squatted in rows like mystical green Buddhas, fat, happy giants, juggling their globes of large round fruits that hung like festive decorations amongst the intoxicating clusters of white-scented blossoms. The valencias always yielded blossoms and young and old fruit on the same tree at the same time which seemed a strange miracle to Maggie: to blossom and harvest in the same moment. The trees stretched out to the cliffs by the barren wash, then ended, so Maggie drove on through the wash, parched and dry now, before the rains and on towards the foothills and the winding road that led up the mountains and on to Highway 18. She’d never driven it herself, so it seemed like she might be going to some faraway foreign land, as if Big Bear were light years from Redlands, and, indeed, she had begun her journey from the faraway land of childhood, Big Bear a light year away, and Devore, somewhere towards Neverland. She’d waited in the driveway on Grant Street the longest time that night. Listening to the sounds of her childhood, the quiet sound of her street, the dim light inside, warm, troubled, safe; the palms above nodded their tall heads like wily giants, the sweet fronds dripping their scraggly whispers over the world and above a world of scattered stars. Would she go? She’d miss the street, the trees, the warm wood of the familiar steps. She had to go. Inside the house, the dim light reflected her world till then. She had to go. Didn’t she? Mustn’t she leave sometime? She ached at leaving, and ached to leave, all in the same small breath. The absence of the pregnancy defined her more than anything she’d ever experienced. After all, it was against the law, and personal, way too personal. How could she talk about it? People just didn’t. She didn’t tell Hank. How could she? No one ever talked about abortion. Especially Maggie. What would people think? What? She knew what to think. She knew it was a big screw up, and she didn’t want to talk about screwing or screwing up even. Forget it, she’d say to herself. No one will ever know. Just mom and dad and Joey Mendoza. And he won’t tell. He’d be stupid to tell. He was a jerk, anyway. But the jerk wouldn’t tell. She never even once considered telling Hank. Why should she? She could leave that abortion right there on those Grant Street door steps like an abandoned child, wrap it in the blanket of youth, and leave it behind.

  She shoved the car in reverse and backed out onto the street. Once on the road, she stomped on the gas all the way to the mountain highway and sped around the curves, the white line whizzing by in the deep mountain moonlight, the road remote and promising. An hour and a half later, she crossed over the dam that rimmed Big Bear Lake, the smooth water reflecting moonshine, the very water that fed her very own house: now at its source. She felt giddy, alone, and adventurous. Her new life existed somewhere here, she could feel it in the cool mountain air, taste it in the smell of the pines, see it in the extraordinary splash of starlight: as if the universe were celebrating her sudden arrival.

  As she passed the motels on the outskirts of town, she slowed the Chevy so she might take it all in: soon she drove through the town; on the sidewalks of one bar a few men leaned into their cars with beer in their hands. Aside from that, the town slept.

  She made a left at the stop sign and continued down the road until she noticed several lights on in a ramshackle hotel. She parked the car, left it without locking, and walked into the empty lobby. Old yellow wallpaper peeled from the walls, and the dark wooden counter had seen much use.

  “Do you like trains?” a voice asked from somewhere invisible.

  “Yes, I think so,” she answered into the large space.

  “You either do or you don’t,” the man said, standing up. Younger than his voice, and taller too, he wore thick, black-rimmed glasses. A red bandana wrapped around his forehead, holding his long brown hair back from his face. His rumpled gray flannel shirt hung open, revealing a black t-shirt: under that his arms, thin and sallow.

  “Everybody likes trains,” answered Maggie, more definitely now that a person appeared before her. Lewis Wilson peered from behind his glasses, as if the glasses had made him invisible before, not his posture behind the counter. He lifted the glasses, rubbed his eyes, and cleaned one lens with the corner of the gray flannel.

  “What do you want?” He looked annoyed at being interrupted from his prior task.

  “A room.”

  “How long do you want a room?”

  “A week, I guess.”

  “You’re only staying a week? This is the Hippy Hotel. You can stay as long as you want.”

  “I only have money for a week. I don’t have a job yet.”

  “How much you got?”

  “Seventy-five dollars, but only fifty for a room.”

  “Tha
t’s enough for two weeks. Give you time to get a job.”

  “Oh, that’s great.”

  Lewis Wilson slammed a key on the counter.

  “Room is on the second floor.”

  “Okay,” she said, reaching for the keys.

  He slammed his hand over the key, “Money?”

  She almost walked out, but aside from his curt manner, she sorta liked him. She dug into her jean pocket and pulled out two twenties and a ten.

  “Don’t let the trains bother you,” he said and then waved her up the stairs and disappeared behind the counter.

  “What trains?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I like trains, remember,” trying to make him hear her.

  “You’ll see,” He smiled.

  “I gotta get some stuff from the car,” she said and went outside for her grandmother’s small black suitcase. Inside the empty lobby again, she tugged the small suitcase up the stairs. Room 211 was three doors down from the top of the stairwell.

  On one side of the room, on the north wall, high almost to the ceiling, a hole was punched in the wall. Well, she thought, cheap. She threw the suitcase on the small wire strung bed, and sat down, trying out the mattress and wondered if she could sleep there. Maybe there was a pea underneath the mattress. What then? She’d be awake all night, she thought, wondering about the strange structure above the bed. Miniature train tracks? Here? Imagine. And then, a long whistle sounded from down the hallway. A few seconds later, a Lionel Flyer came clacketing through the hole above her bed: the part of track in room 211 created a six percent grade beyond the hole, bringing the track right over the top of the bed; the track hugged the wall on the south wall, banked to the left in the corner, and did a loop, extending the tracks between the dresser and the closet and right on out the other wall near the miniature water tower. On the flat bed of one of the sections of train was a small burning object, but the train disappeared quickly and Maggie smiled. That’s what he meant! Trains! My god! She heard the train winding down its slippery track for a while and then stop. Someone laughed.

  Lewis Wilson had built train tacks that wound through every room, starting from his own apartment, with the master switches on the top floor. He could stop the train in any room, start it off again: Then, he’d put burning joints on the flat-cars, especially when new grass arrived in town, sending a bomber joint to chugga, chugga, choo, choo, throughout all the rooms. There was a minature water tower, but no switches in Maggie’s room. She couldn’t change directions.

  She liked this funny old place instantly. She put the suitcase on the floor and leaned back on the bed. She didn’t wake later when the Lionel Flyer came chugga, chugga, choo, chooing right through her purple dreams of hazy night thought, mingling the scent of orange blossoms with the clackety-clack of the night-flyer and something new, unknown, provacative.

  In the morning, when she woke, she felt vivid and new: the cold crisp air of the mountains, invigorating, promising, alive.

  Hank arrived in Big Bear three weeks after Maggie. He’d wandered into the Hippie Hotel looking for an old friend just as Maggie walked into the lobby. She dropped a flower she’d been pinning into her hair.

  “Here, let me.” He picked the rose from the floor while grabbing her hand, pulling her to her feet. His calloused fingers wrapped around hers and he instantly felt the connection. The impulse formed small eruptions, the feeling unleashing a part of him, till then, unknown: a genuine curiosity about someone else. He recognized something else, another dimension, fuller, larger, more complex, yet he sensed a contradiction. He was intrigued, not because the dimension seemed like his own, but because it did not. He was curious; the curiosity swept him with it, seemingly of the instant, of that here and now. An insistent curiosity. She had seemed like a wayward child, spontaneously open, of that moment and all the moments yet to come. A current erupted between them urging space for newness, as if they were both suspended in a new language, a story born of dizzying magnetism. Yet a part of him refrained, a more cerebral part watching the encounter the other part was having; he watched her waken to his touch, his voice. He smiled white lightning, interrupting her posture claiming its singular existence, urging the story onto a new page.

  “It’s okay. Do you live here?” he had asked.

  “About a month.” Maggie answered, fingering her hair, searching for the pin holding the rose in place, as if searching for an anchor, something to give her a firm, rooted hold, as if lost in this moment. “I guess I lost the pin.”

  “You’ll have to hold it in your teeth then, like Carmen,” he said.

  “Is that what Carmen does?”

  “Well, I’ve just always imagined Carmen with a flower in her mouth.”

  “A romantic?”

  “Depends on the flower,” he had teased. He had let his eyes move over her, looking decidedly at all her parts, as if assessing that she had two arms, two legs, one mouth. That kind of look. Approving.

  “Shoot,” said Maggie. “I wish I hadn’t dropped it.”

  “You always have to be careful about what you wish for,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A wish has a life of its own and that life is a real as anything. A wish more than not will come true if you wish it in the right way.”

  That sort of scared Maggie, and she thought about the things she’d wished for. But her wishes, at that moment, were mostly about skiing. She’d always wished her dad would get well. But she’d wished that wish a long time ago. That was one wish that didn’t seem to have its own life.

  “Well, this flower will have to find another pin,” she’d said, realizing she was late for work. “I can’t work with a flower in my mouth. And I’m late. Nice bumping into you.” She had pushed herself down the hall, and he yelled after her.

  “Who did I bump into?”

  “Maggie Anne Morrison.”

  As she slipped out the door, she’d heard him say, “I’ve always wanted one of those.”

  And now, as she stood on the patio, the curious wind rustled again, slapping against them both, as if they both might catch in the gust, rise then like kites on curious circumstance, tumble then out-of-sight, untethered except by windswept independence. The certain electricity snapped and crackled charging particles of dust into their windblown hair, fulling the simple cottons like silk-sails, plunging the unpredictable moment with erratic wishes, wishes tumbling in a desert wind now taking its own curious course.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Hank said, squinting against a gust of dust.

  “It took a while to get things together.” She felt his look move inside her, probing and unnerving, but she felt she could form her own pattern in this part of uncultivated desert landscape; there were no Victorian houses lining the streets, there was no context she couldn’t fit. She wasn’t tied to some convention, but seemingly outside them all. It felt like another part of her, as if part of no other existence, as if her past had suddenly tumbled away and whispered back at her, as this other self moved into this here. This now.

  In Big Bear, the evening she’d bumped into Hank in the hallway, there was a note on her door inviting her to a party upstairs. She was tired from a long night of waiting tables, but went upstairs to the party anyway. The grass smelled good. The party, an aimless creature, sauntered in and out of the hotel rooms, like the Lionel Flyer, and on the flat bed of the train, a collection of hand-rolled joints sat on the bed like a stack of logs, and as the train careened around the halls and rooms, people grabbed a joint, lit it, passed it around the party.

  The party wandered outside to the upstairs balcony, down the long outside wooden stairs and stumbled through a drift of snow beyond the parking lot where some folks lingered in the cold.

  She pushed herself through the crowd and outside to the upstairs balcony and pulled a beer from the snow and moved back inside the room.

  Some guy, sitting on the floor by the coffee table, had just broken off a marijuana bud from a long stem of dry r
esiny flowers into the top of a shoe box and crushed it with his fingers. He separated the seeds by sweeping a matchbook through the grass and the seed fell to the tipped lower lip of the box top. He smoothed a rolling paper around his finger, collected the seedless grass with the matchbook, and sprinkled the grass, along the crease of the paper, rolled a fat, two-handed joint, licking the seam and squeezing as he rolled it through his fingers.

  “This is good shit,” he said, and took a long suck on the unlit joint.

  He put the joint on the table because someone else handed him a roach. He took a hit and handed it to Maggie. She took a hit, and it went out, so she passed it to this guy with a beard and he ate it. She got up because she was really light-headed from the beer and the grass and started out to the balcony to get some fresh air when she saw Hank again.

  “Hey, Morrison, you wanna get out of here for a while?” he asked.

  His eyes were streaked red-orbs, barely visible from underneath the sandy hair. She got this rush, from the grass, from him, who knows, and she started to say no, to find a reason to avoid him, to crawl back inside herself, but he grabbed her arm softly and urged her down the stairs, across a field of white night snow, farther into a darkness fractured with starlight tumbling from one constellation to the next, and onward into her future. Another Maggie might have turned and walked away, but maybe not …

  As they walked over to his car, he introduced himself as Hank Hardiman, but before she could ask him anything, two cop cars pulled up in front of the hotel. Maggie and Hank quietly slipped into the Volkswagen and sat motionless.