A Prayer for Travelers

by Ruchika Tomar

  If family is nothing but the accumulation of routine among two or more people, here was ours: Lamb cut the thick pine table in the center of the kitchen himself, along with four spindle back chairs to match. We sat in the same pair every meal, though the others were hardly occupied. It was the only time he showed blatant affection to the dogs, dropping a piece of meat into each of their bowls, rubbing a grateful furry head.

  After Lamb retired for the night, I stayed up washing our dishes in the sink, the kitchen window facing our rocky yard, the grade of pebbled soil and milkweed rising gradually into mountain. I lingered over the soapy plates and glasses, waiting for coyotes to emerge along the back ridge. They scavenged for small dogs, an unlucky cat, their bright eyes bobbing as they ran. The way they paced the fences, raising their snouts to howl.

  5

  Penny hung out with the same girls since elementary school. I remembered them as they were on the playground: sweet Luz; severe Flaca; Lourdes the petite, mercurial math genius. In high school they met every morning on the brush-covered knoll in front of the administration building, haughty and dispassionate in their tight jeans, constantly reapplying layers of glittery lip gloss. Penny was the obvious beauty among them, all long hair and dark eyes, the kind of mouth that could never successfully be made demure. Boys waylaid her in the halls with their coughs and dip-legged swaggers, leaning their hands against her locker as if they could box her in. I assumed she was the girls’ ringleader, the bad influence, the reason they were always in the bathrooms smoking slims or joints with their polished nails flashing.

  Late spring my senior year, when the desert snowberry and golden suncups were blooming on the hill above the classroom, and the promise of freedom was mounting in the halls, I went in to use the girls’ bathroom. They were all there inside. I took my time washing my hands, then stood dripping for full minutes, waiting for Luz to notice she was blocking the paper towels. She was telling them all a story, using her hands to draw dramatic shapes in the air. When she saw me, she dropped her hands to her hips, trying to decide whether or not to be annoyed. I still wore shyness then, I didn’t know it wouldn’t be long in shedding, that I would molt my timidity in stages like the collared lizards racing across the desert, leaving pieces of themselves behind on the sand.

  Penny sat on one of the sinks and leaned back against the tiles, studying me. She had painted her lips a new, bright fuchsia. I didn’t understand why they were still here. Lourdes had skipped the first grade, and Flaca had been held back in the fourth. Though Penny was a year older than me, she had ditched the entire spring quarter the previous year for reasons that remained elusive to Vista High’s most interrogative gossips. During this sabbatical, she was spotted slinging plates at Jake’s diner and flirting with Trigger Casey at his father’s corner store while the crew roamed the aisles, lifting bags of chips and bottles of beer. One afternoon I had run into her alone, picking through the dusty thrift store bookshelves. When she saw me, she had flushed red and straightened immediately as if reproached, stalking past me to the registers with her hands full of decade-old glossies. Now in a few weeks we would all graduate together. I doubted any of them knew my name.

  I should have stepped away from the sinks and dried my hands on my shorts, letting them be. But I had been invisible for so long, I was starting to wonder if I still had a fleshly outline, a concrete human shape. I was struggling to find the right thing to say, and a reason to say it. Penny held her cigarette at a rakish angle, narrowing her eyes at me in the smoke. Finally she reached over, pushing Luz on the side of the head.

  “Move, pinche,” she said.

  3

  Lamb took me to the Blue Creek Casino and Eagles Bay, the Lucky Grand, the Golden Bear and East River Mills. There still existed, in those early days, a palpable space between the second father I made him into and the bachelor he used to be. Early winter mornings, when it was cold enough for our breath to fog the air, we packed into Lamb’s truck for the long drive and watched the land dip and surge across the miles, breaching under a wide, glassy sky.

  I slept away the day, my head bumping gently against the window, and opened my eyes to fading dusk. How the first sight of sparkling lights outside a passenger window could transfix a lonely girl. We stood in the check-in line for casino motels, still wearing crisp January air on our cheeks and collars. I clung to the three outer fingers of Lamb’s calloused hand, ignoring the discriminating glances of older men and women. Who would bring a child to a place reserved for adult things, adult sins? I could have told them. Someone who has nowhere else to put her.

  I trailed Lamb across smoke-tinged rooms, treading elaborately patterned carpets, the wood tables polished as jewels. The underbellies of these casinos were cold and drafty basements, cheap carpeting buckling under card tables ringed with beer-glazed men, raucous and wild. A furtive society, balm to the desert’s sand-worn lifers, those souls grousing eternally between earth and sun. Oh, yes—the west takes care of its own in these small, forgotten towns. We build in us still those cursed dreams of gold.

  At the East River, with a pale, gibbous moon hanging high, we arrived weary. We checked in after midnight to two twin beds, side by side. In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of a heavy latch falling into place. In the next bed the sheets were mussed, empty. Lamb was gone. I pushed aside my own scratchy sheets and climbed out of bed. I looked for him in the bathroom and the closet, as if a grown man might play games in the dark, as if he might hide himself away like a parcel. I stole into the cold hall still muddled with sleep, wearing only a T-shirt.

  I took a few steps down the hall and nearly collided with an odd, dark stranger rounding the corner. He wore a high, round collar and diagonal tie, a long frock coat. He walked on without a stumble or excuse, striding, his hands tucked behind his back. Lamb’s word for a friend you meet in old places, a man you should never follow: s-p-e-c-t-e-r. The ghost brought me up short. I could have ridden the elevator down to the gaming floor and run across the carpet of players, screaming for Lamb, for rescue. They’d kick us out, which wouldn’t bother Lamb a bit. But he would feel he had made an error, bringing a child on one of his peculiar tours to some place where I might do little and participate in less. I was meant to spend my time amusing myself in the café with ice cream sundaes or watching the television in the room—luxuries exotic when compared with our home, which held only books, and each other. These trips felt like running, but what were we running to?

  I returned to the doorway of our room and sat on the floor to wait. An hour passed, maybe two. When Lamb manifested at the end of the hall, his expression was warm and loose, his eyes bright with the faraway look of someone who had visited a freedom and wished to remain there. He saw his impolitely dressed gargoyle in the doorway and bent to lift her. I didn’t have to ask. He packed his bag and then my own. An hour later, ours was the only truck heading west on the two-lane, zooming past the other cars that took fast shape in the dark, emerging from nothing and disappearing just as fast, headlights fading gently into night.

  32

  The police station was an old timber-front at the end of a long, sloping road, a lingering reminder of Pomoc’s coal mining days. Scattered along the western ridge were the town’s other relics: the three-sided frame of a gutted firehouse half a mile past; the rusted, hollowed-out caboose from the railway depot standing in a field of weeds; the tracks long since foraged for lumber. Only a few steps inside the station the feeling of history began to dissolve. The smell of wood shavings from recent construction, the stale remains of a burger lunch. The first and only time I’d been inside was ten years earlier: Lamb determined to talk his way out of a ticket for a broken taillight, and I still small enough to be made coy by the aged spirit of the place; the mold in the wood, dust particles floating by a front-facing window. A gray-haired patrolman stationed at the front desk had broken into laughter at the sight of Lamb, then Lamb followed suit, the two men clasping each
other’s hands and shoulders, reminiscing a shared boyhood I would never know.

  There was no one at the front desk now. The entire reception area was covered by a heavy plastic tarpaulin, the station in the midst of painful repair, flailing helplessly toward modernization. The pole chairs in the waiting area had been replaced by four rows of molded orange seats bolted into the floor and another dense, filmy tarp hung over the doorway, obscuring what lay beyond. On the floor, gray dust lay mottled in the fading light.

  Beyond the tarp, I heard a phone ring. I pushed aside the plastic sheeting and followed a man’s short, muffled laugh down the length of a cramped hallway, past several plywood doors painted white, unisex signposts nailed into the wood. The hall widened into a large room furnished with six wide desks, three set close on either end. The south wall was lined with metal shelves buttressing cardboard boxes and ancient computer monitors, a wild tangle of multicolored cords and wires, a coffeepot giving off the burnt, acrid scent of recent use, a stack of Styrofoam cups and stirrers.

  The room’s only occupant in the room was a young, lanky cop I didn’t know, his buzzcut bleached platinum, eyebrows still dark and spiky. A part-time townie from one of the census-designated places surrounding Pomoc, waking each morning to dress in the dark, climbing into his car to travel fifteen to forty-five down a two-lane to clip on a badge for a town that wasn’t really his. He glanced up briefly from his call, then again, in a way that recalled to me the ugly cut above my eye, the bruise an imprecise crescent moon around my right temple, spilling onto my cheek. I hesitated, but his call was winding down, and when he hung up he reached over to turn on the small silver radio on his desk, fiddling with the knob to filter out the sound. Staticky AC/DC filled the space between us.

  “I called earlier,” I said. The room had the poor acoustics of old timber. “I spoke to a woman on the phone. I’m worried about a friend of mine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She didn’t come in to work today. I went to her place and she wasn’t there.”

  His touch on the radio dial: refining, meticulous, coaxing a hatched insect to fly.

  “She doesn’t miss work,” I continued. “The woman I spoke to earlier on the phone told me I could come. I could file a report.”

  “That number gets rerouted to county.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know what she said to you. She’s a secretary.” He chinned in my direction. “What happened to your face?”

  I could feel the perspiration gathering underneath my arms, the back of my neck. “The woman on the phone said it didn’t matter how long she’s been gone. I could just fill one out.”

  “Your friend takes a day off work, you don’t fill out a report. Maybe she went shopping.”

  His fingers dropped from the radio knob. He looked up at me again, his eyes a cool sandstone assessing the marks on my face, the nervy energy I knew I was giving off, the jitter I had been feeling ever since my fingers closed around Penny’s cellphone. I took a deep breath.

  “I’d really like to talk to someone.”

  “You’re talking to me.”

  “No, I want to file a report.” The building with its tarpaulins and dust. A structure in disarray, the feeling of things that had already gone too far.

  The cop was watching me more carefully now, a curious expression on his face.

  “Give it a day,” he said.

  82

  6

  In the evenings after work, Lamb drove by the house and laid on the horn until I emerged, streaking barefoot across the drive. Cesar sat up front with Lamb, a worker between them in the jump. I clambered onto the truck bed where laborers were crowded thigh to thigh, laughing at the sight of me.

  “¡Ay, cuidado mija!”

  “¡Niña loca!”

  One of the workers grabbed my wrist, hauling me up. I pressed baby hands onto their denim-covered knees, scrambling for a seat. What I mean to say is, from a young age, I have known men’s hands on my person. Brothers and fathers and sons pulling me to sit on a lap, squishing me into too-small spaces between them. Permitting me to crush my nose against their T-shirts, trace their varied arms—light as teak, dark as dravite—sniff their necks damp with sweat and sweet cologne, liberally reapplied after quitting time. For their wives maybe, or for each other.

  Then Lamb peeled down the road, a parachute of dirt billowing from our back tires. Dusk bathed Pomoc in ginger light, softening all her edges. Even the turquoise hour motel on the corner appeared an oasis, a cool aquamarine. We drove by the swap meet, the proprietors breaking down wire stalls of spandex tops and plastic toys, twelve distinct candy scents of rollerball perfume. In front of Lupe’s grocery someone had hung a piñata in the shape of a donkey, his flame-colored tail fluttering in the breeze.

  The Crossroads was in the center of the palo, the mobile homes arranged in blocks of four connected by several narrow lanes, each unit augmented by a slim asphalt yard. Before the truck came to a stop the men dropped the hitch, jumping off one by one, rapping their knuckles across the truck’s flank before dispersing into the maze. Cesar lingered to finish his conversation with Lamb; their friendship forged in the early days of the plant when Cesar still worked the ice chute beside the men, braced by years of success and failure: two wives buried, one child lost, another eventually found. Four weeks after Cesar laid his wife to rest, his house was boxed up and tagged for sale, the furniture carted off. He returned to the Crossroads by choice with a card table and a La-Z-Boy recliner, one coffeepot for the black stuff, a second to boil hot dogs in.

  After they finished talking, Cesar came around the truck bed and swung me into his arms, my sneakers knocking his hips and thighs. He buckled me into the front seat and let me grasp two of his gnarled fingers—to prefer him, as I did, whenever Lamb was cross, obstinate, oblivious, all gradients of Lamb’s residual bachelordom that flared during a day spent in the rough company of men. Only when Cesar was gone could Lamb begin the slow process of recalibrating to guardianship. He glanced over several times on the drive, as if just discovering the small, strange stowaway in his passenger seat, gold eyes affixed to his coarse and ropy largeness.

  Remember me. Be my family.

  How he must have felt, to be handed a child so long after that part of his life was through.

  33

  I walked out of the police station into the haze of late afternoon. The smell of smoke hung low on the air, another brush fire late in the season. I stood by the truck feeling damp heat gather at the center of my back. Any other day, Penny would be waiting at home for the last vestige of afternoon to wilt before starting off for work, making her way through the Crossroads in her waitress sneakers, heading in the direction of the long road parallel to the park’s entrance. She would veer right, past the first sooty bus stop, heading straight toward the palo’s dusk hustle. To make short work of cutting across town, she might wait at the second bus stop on El Cerro and catch the number 36 express line, riding five quick stops to Main, or cross catty-corner to the panadería for a coffee and a roll, chatting with Maria until Flaca emerged from the back room and offered her a ride. Penny would wait for Flaca to step around the counter before brushing the flour from Flaca’s clothes, tugging her ponytail, pinching her arm, dodging to avoid the other girl’s swat. Finally they would walk outside and climb into Flaca’s car for the short drive across the palo, arriving in the diner’s parking lot under the glorious blue evening already unfurled.

  In the midst of scribbling down an order, I would hear Penny slamming the car door outside, jogging up the porch steps in her sneakers. At the delicate tinkling of the gold bell above the diner’s door, I would look up to catch her slipping inside, pink-cheeked, sweat gathering at the edges of her temples, her long hair swept up into a gravity-defying topknot, shooting a grin before she disappeared into the back room to set her purse onto a shelf, picking her apron off the hook to wrap the
long strings twice around her slender waist, yanking them tight.

  Leaving the station now, I pulled out of the lot to follow her trajectory, passing the bus as it turned down View to Fortuna, hanging a left on Main, the buzzcut cop’s voice echoing behind. Give it a day. I was hoping for a happy accident: stumbling upon Penny in the diner’s back room; she was studying next week’s schedule with her canted squint, taking down her hair to brush it out with her fingers before bringing it around her shoulder to methodically plait a long, thick braid. Give it a day, the cop said. But he didn’t have the image of her empty bed seared into his mind, the coffee can full of cash.

  I pulled up to the diner, a few cars dotting the lot. The porch’s fresh coat of white paint caught in the sun. In another hour someone would come outside to empty the ashtrays between the Adirondack chairs and plug in the Christmas lights that sparkled around the railing in all seasons, luring truckers and townies both. I spotted Jake’s rolled-shouldered shape moving in the window, lumbering between the booths. A Junior, Jake was his father’s namesake and reluctant heir. The diner remained their grand linoleum kingdom despite Jr.’s well-documented scorn for serving. If Penny had called, if she was on her way now, Jake wouldn’t be running plates. Still I climbed out of the truck and stepped carefully up the stairs, waiting until Jake turned his back to ease open the door and slip past the counter. The back room was cool and quiet. The three-part sink had been emptied of dishes and an array of aluminum blender cups dripped on the rack, signaling a busy lunch. A stock delivery had recently arrived, the boxes piled high against the shelves. The massive walk-in freezer gave off its eerie low hum. Above Jake’s desk I pulled down a stack of dusty phone books, the newest still two years old. Of all the girls, I figured Lourdes was the most likely to be home. I flipped through the white pages to the letter H and ran my finger down the list of names. Thirteen listings for Hernandez, all of them men. I dialed the first number listed. A child answered on the first ring.