by Mary Morris
I feel as if I can breathe again after having my face in a plastic bag. “I’m fine,” I say. “I’m all right.” Scott wants to play darts. He puts his arm around me and says there’s a nice concession with velvet paintings, the kind he knows I like to put over the mantel or hang in the kids’ rooms. He promises he’ll win one for me. I think how sweet it is of Scott to think of me, how he is good for remembering the little things.
As we cross the arcade, Patti and Ross are walking just ahead of us. They’ve got their arms around one another like sweethearts and the kids are nowhere in sight. He keeps slipping his hand into her back pocket and she keeps taking it out, putting it around her waist. They turn off the side of the arcade onto the darkened fairgrounds. I think how Patti’s always complaining to me, how her life is a roller coaster, but I think how maybe she’s lucky it’s not like mine, flat like the mesa where we live.
We head in the direction of the dart concession. Barkers call. They offer us their giant stuffed animals, their velvet paintings, their Kewpie dolls. “Here,” one shouts, “make this basket and make my day.” Another throws a softball, “Easy as pie.” From the distance I can see the barker at the dart concession where Scott is leading me. He hurls darts backwards over his shoulder, popping balloons behind him, and calling out to passersby.
I recognize him, not by his face, but by his clean pressed look, by the way everything fits so smooth around his skin. At first I don’t think he recognizes me, but slowly it seems to come to him and he smiles a crooked smile. “Here,” he says, looking Scott up and down, “win one for the lady.”
“Let’s go,” I say, “I don’t want any of those,” pointing at the velvet paintings. But Scott knows I do because I’m always asking for more paintings to put on the walls and make our house look more like a home.
Scott takes the darts and puts his dollar down. He bites his mustache, takes careful aim. He misses the first, then the second. He puts another dollar down, then misses again. Scott Junior wants to play and Scott puts money down for him. I wish I hadn’t eaten the cotton candy and the popcorn with the kids and I’m wishing I hadn’t gone on any of the big rides at all because my stomach is starting to feel shaky, the way Scott Junior’s always does.
I think Scott is ready to stop playing, but the blond man keeps saying, “Come on. Win one for the lady.” I feel his eyes on me as if he knows something about me I don’t even know. Scott tries again. He pulls in his breath and throws the dart with all his force, but the balloon just seems to move out of his way. So now the blond man jumps down.
“Here,” he says, “let me help you.” He takes the darts and tosses them one, two, three over his head. The balloons all pop. “Take your pick,” he says to me. “Which one will it be?” Scott, looking dejected now with the Elvis picture in his hand, doesn’t say a word. I think how I’ve only seen him look this way once before, the time the bronco busted in his ribs.
I look over the prizes. Velvet paintings of mountain streams and wild beasts, Mexican villages and beautiful girls. “No thank you,” I say.
But the blond man says take it, so I pick the lions—big yellow lions—from halfway around the world against a blue velvet background to hang above Stephanie’s bed. Stephanie bobs beside me, rubbing the velvet with her hand. “Thank you,” I say. “Our daughter will like this.”
The blond man from the laundromat smiles as if we are partners in a scam. “See you,” he says.
As we start to leave, a toothless lady barker beckons to me with tobacco-stained fingers. The children still want to play, but I look at the prizes—giant stuffed animals that look gray and frayed like they’ve seen too many carnivals where nobody has won. I clutch the girls by the hands, leading them away, and tell Scott Junior to walk straight ahead. It is late as we get to the car. I turn and look back to see the carnival for the last time, shimmering against the sky, and I think how I can see all the pieces and joints where it is assembled. How it looks as if it could all come tumbling down.
That night when we get home, everything feels dirty and I can’t seem to get the odor of the carnival off my skin. The kids’ clothes are dusty. Stephanie’s pants have a syrupy goo on the leg and Scott Junior’s shirt is covered with grime. Even Nicole, who is normally so neat, has gum on her socks. So I think I’ll do the wash tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday. I’ll do it even though the laundromat will be full and it’s not my washing day.
They saw the first sign miles back. “Dinosaur tracks,” it read. “I want to stop,” Melanie said. “I want to see them.” Hal didn’t protest. The signs were pointing their way.
On their trip they’d seen all the usual things. The dam, the canyon, the valley with its strange eroded shapes. Hal had captured Melanie in photos at the canyon rim at dusk and protesting on the back of a mule at midday. They’d stopped at every scenic view and lookout, read every historic marker, taken pictures at each horizon. Now they were on their way home.
The Winnebago was holding up well. They’d refurbished it for the journey, complete with microwave and miniature dishwasher. “I’m not traveling for two months without a dishwasher,” Melanie had said. But since they’d been on the road, she almost wished she hadn’t bothered. It wasn’t much doing dishes for just the two of them.
The signs were handwritten, almost in a child’s scrawl, and Melanie had counted four since she’d seen the first one. “Dinosaur tracks, straight ahead.” And then a faint arrow pointing in the direction they were headed. “We won’t even have to go out of our way,” she told Hal, knowing that was something he hated to do. “We can probably just pull off the road.”
They had begun planning the trip almost a year ago, though at first Melanie had resisted. “What if Kelly calls while we’re away,” she’d said. “What if she decides to come home then?” Kelly, their youngest daughter, had disappeared two years before. But Hal had gone ahead and put the better part of his year’s commission into the Winnebago. He was a real estate broker for Century 21. A salesman of parcels of land. He wore the brown and yellow jacket of all Century 21 brokers—a jacket that Melanie said made him look like a wasp—and took hopefuls in and out of other people’s homes.
Melanie was a high school teacher of geometry, and they’d never seen the Wild West before. This tour of the national parks was for them a dream they’d talked about for years. It was what they’d wanted to do as soon as the kids were grown. They hadn’t minded the traffic jams in Yellowstone or the grizzly warnings posted in Glacier. They hadn’t minded the lines of Japanese and German tourists stomping around the Grand Canyon. They both agreed it was the trip of a lifetime.
At Four Corners Hal had, despite Melanie’s embarrassment, squatted down on all fours, managing to put his legs in Utah and Colorado, his hands in New Mexico and Arizona, and said he felt like king of the world.
Seeing him spread like that across four states, Melanie had thought how he was the only man she’d known. They’d met at Disneyland on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride when they were fourteen. They’d stood in line behind one another and shared a little boat that carried them wordlessly past the magic lantern and Spanish moss of the Blue Bayou and then hurled them screaming into the dungeons where captives pleaded for mercy. She had clutched his arm. The thrust into darkness had sealed their fate.
The signs were erratic. Sometimes they were very frequent. Other times they disappeared, and then Melanie despaired of ever following them anywhere. Then they’d come again, only to fade, making Melanie think that they must have passed the place where the dinosaurs had been. Then they’d appear, more insistent than before. “Dinosaur tracks ahead. You must stop here. Don’t miss.” Melanie didn’t know why she wanted to see them. They had already seen so much. Hal had planned their trip down to the last detail, booking each campsite well in advance. He had surprised her with the brief white-water rafting tour down the little tributary of the Colorado and with a night in a cement teepee with “Rent Me” painted on its side. She’d done things on this trip she’d never dre
amed of doing before.
But she had never seen real dinosaur tracks. Once as a girl her mother had gotten her a dinosaur diorama, and she tried to imagine what had lived twenty-five million years ago, what had wiped them out. But she hadn’t thought of dinosaurs much since then, not until she began seeing the signs. Now she had to see where the signs were leading them.
“I’m not sure,” Hal said after a while. “It might take us out of our way.”
“Well, worse things could happen,” Melanie said.
Hal shook his head, pondering this for a time. It was the way things had been with him—tilting his head and pondering in silence for long periods—ever since Kelly had disappeared. She was alive, lost in America, that was all they knew. They knew she wasn’t dead because every few months or so a card would come that read, “I’m fine, Kelly.” Those cards were the only things, Melanie thought at times, that kept them from going insane.
Kelly had disappeared with that no-good boyfriend of hers, a biker, when she was just seventeen. Hal had forbidden her to keep seeing him, so one day she got on the back of his Harley at five A.M. in front of their Mission Viejo home and disappeared. Melanie hadn’t wanted to make this trip because she’d thought, What if Kelly returns? What if this is the time she decides to come home and I’m not there? “She’ll ask a neighbor, for Christ’s sake,” Hal had said. But then he’d added more gently, “Besides, it will do you good to get away for a while.” In the end Melanie had taped a letter to the door and left a message on the answering machine. “If this is Kelly calling, we’ll be home in August. Please tell us where you are. If it’s anyone else, leave a message when you hear the beep.” Melanie didn’t care who heard this message. She didn’t care who knew of their private grief.
It had been a long time since they’d seen a sign. “We must’ve passed it,” Hal said.
“No,” Melanie replied firmly, “I’m sure we haven’t.”
“Who cares about these swamp-bound, pea-brained creatures,” Hal said with a smile. “I’m interested in the here and now.” He tapped the wheel with his fingers. But he decided to humor her. After all, she’d given him the videocam for the trip. She’d even held it as he pretended to be jumping into the Grand Canyon. So since they were on their way home and she wanted to see dinosaur tracks, well, he reasoned, let her see them.
They hadn’t noticed how the terrain had changed. But now they drove across a landscape with no buildings in sight except for the occasional farmhouse or roundhouses that Melanie wondered about. The land itself looked prehistoric. The earth turned a deep shade of red. Giant red forms, like sculptures, suddenly appeared on the horizon. Sometimes the road descended into canyons with huge rocks jutting up on either side. But otherwise they were traveling across a flat, red terrain where as far as they could see there was nothing but giant billowy clouds. Thunderstorms formed in the distance; sheets of rain could be seen coming down.
Cars were replaced by pickups, RVs by battered minivans with rusty bodies. The women had long dark hair. The men were dark and wore cowboy hats. She opened the map, trying to figure out where they were or if they had taken a wrong turn. But the AAA TripTik made it clear that this was the way to go. Hal turned on the radio to get some news, but the only station he could reach had a deep chanting voice, singing in rhythmic hums. They were crossing Navajo land.
It was almost two o’clock when they stopped at a restaurant in a small town for lunch. It was the only town and restaurant they had seen for quite a while, and they were hungry, so they decided to stop. They parked and walked into the Red Sands. All the women had black braids. The men all wore a single braided ponytail. One of the men was putting up an American flag with an Indian in the middle. Hal shook his head. Melanie showed him the map where AAA had made a circle in this town, but she saw that Hal didn’t like it at all.
Melanie thought the restaurant was nice. It had posters of John Wayne—the Duke, they called him back in Orange County, where she was from—and Marlboro men on the wall. There were ads for Cherokee vans with Indians posing in front of them. A sign read, “Nobody knows the trail better,” from the U.S. West Information Centers, with cowboys and Indians galloping across the plains.
In one corner three blond people sat, and Hal and Melanie went to sit near them, but they were speaking a foreign language, which Melanie decided was German or Dutch. The Navajo station played chants on the loudspeakers and Hal grimaced. “I wish they’d turn that down,” he said.
But Melanie said she liked it. “It’s a soothing sound,” she said, closing her eyes. “I feel like a baby being lulled to sleep.”
A man with a white ribbon woven through his braid came to take their order. Hal asked for a beer and the man said, “No beer.”
“No beer?”
“No beer on the reservation.”
Hal frowned. “How big is this reservation?” he asked.
“You’ve got two hundred more miles,” the Indian said.
Melanie ordered a green-chili omelette with sour cream. “Just to try something different,” she said.
Hal ordered a hamburger and fries.
When the Indian returned with their order, Melanie said, “Excuse me, but do you know where the dinosaur tracks are?”
“The dinosaur tracks?” the Indian asked. “You want to see the tracks? Then go to Shonto. You will see the sign.”
Melanie flipped through the TripTik, looking for Shonto. The Indian looked at her squarely. He had deep-set eyes, a furrowed brow, and pockmarked skin. “What you are looking for,” he said very distinctly, as if he expected her to commit this to memory, “is Head of Mother Earth Mountain.”
“Head of Mother Earth,” Melanie repeated.
“This is where the dinosaur tracks are, if that is what you want to find.”
Melanie looked at him oddly. Hal glanced up from the map. “Shonto. Is it out of our way?”
The Indian looked puzzled. “Is what out of your way?”
“The dinosaur tracks,” Hal said.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” the Indian said, “but I’m sure it is not out of your way.”
Melanie dozed in the RV after lunch as they drove in the direction of Shonto. Hal thought it would be at least a ten-mile detour, and he began to grumble. When he got this way, Melanie willed herself to sleep. As she slept, she didn’t dream of Kelly as she often did when she was just dozing. And she didn’t dream the dream that had recently come to her many times: that she was holding a baby in her arms—a baby in a diaper who sucked on a bottle—except the baby was a full-grown woman she held and rocked and cooed to. This time she dreamed of beasts, of dinosaurs, giant lumbering creatures roaming the land. She saw them wandering the bubbly terrain. She saw their giant feet come down, leaving a trace. It was the dinosaurs who came to her, and she imagined that from beneath the layers of sediment, creatures rose from the ruins.
When she awoke they were driving on a dirt road, and she had no sense of how long she had been asleep. It could have been moments or days. If Hal hadn’t said “Damn” when the road turned to gravel, she was sure she would have just slept on.
“Oh,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “it can’t be far on this road. Did you see a sign?”
“A sign for what?”
“For the tracks. Have you seen another sign?”
“There was one at the turnoff about a mile back. It said five miles.”
“Good.”
He reminded her that the last sign had said ten miles, and that was hours ago. “What kind of place is this? Can’t get good directions. Can’t get a drink.”
“I like it,” Melanie said. “I don’t know why.”
One of the things Melanie liked was that she hadn’t thought about Kelly in a while. She hadn’t, for example, dreamed about Kelly. She hadn’t looked at the back of each motorcycle, thinking maybe she’d see her daughter there. She hadn’t thought about the last time she saw her, the night before she disappeared. Kelly was sitting up in bed, uncharacteristi
cally still, reading, in a pink nightie, and Melanie, not wanting to disturb her, had just stood in the doorway and blown her a kiss. “I should have gone to her,” Melanie has said dozens of times since Kelly has been gone. “I shouldn’t have just stood at the door.”
She also hadn’t thought about what she thinks about most often—Kelly’s return. Melanie likes to run this scenario through her mind. How she will be standing in the kitchen when she hears the motorcycle pull up. How she’ll stop as if frozen in time as the engine dies in front of her house. Then she’ll go to the window and see Kelly walking up the front walk, her dark curls flying in the wind. When Melanie thinks of this, she often bursts into tears no matter where she is, no matter what she is doing. If Hal is with her, he always says the same thing. “You have two perfectly good children. I don’t know why you are breaking your heart over this one.” But often later she’ll find him weeping. “You know,” he’ll say, “she is my daughter, too.”
When she first disappeared, they tried to find her. They filed missing-person reports with the police throughout California. They ran ads in all the major newspapers in the West. They even hired a detective, but no one came up with any leads. Finally a police officer said to them, “Do you know how many kids like yours are missing out there?” his hands sweeping across the country. The best thing, he told them, is to stay home and wait.
For almost two years Melanie stayed home. She would hardly go to the store. If she did, she put the answering machine on, always stating how long she’d be gone. If she came home and there was a hang-up, she’d play it over and over, listening for the slightest sound, a clue to where the caller might have been calling from. She couldn’t answer the door or the phone without a flicker of hope that this time it would be Kelly. And now for the first time in those years—since they’d begun looking for the dinosaur tracks—Melanie had hardly thought of her at all.
At the trading post in Shonto they stopped for supplies. Four or five Indians sat in front of the building. As the RV pulled in they got up and stared. Not many RVs come to this trading post, Melanie thought. “How far to the dinosaur tracks?” Hal asked. “Not far,” said the old Indian who worked at the register. “Just up the road.”