I was sinking, the ground falling away.
“Everything is dark,” I said.
8
Forty miles outside of Pomoc in a town called Cajon, big enough for a real grocery store, a hair salon, and a tumbledown movie theater playing a tired roster of five films already forgotten by the rest of the world, the baby-faced doctor stood in the middle of a handsome office, crushing my small hand inside his clammy palm. I stared at his tie, then him for confirmation.
“Yes, parrots,” he said, then withdrew to settle behind the kind of desk Lamb would never make, a gleaming, ostentatious cherrywood spectacle. On the wall behind the doctor’s head hung an impressive display of diplomas from colleges in New York and California. I took a seat in the empty chair next to Lamb. What kind of man would go live in so many beautiful places, only to return here?
“As I was telling Mr. Lambert earlier . . . in these situations, it’s always a good idea to have someone to talk to. A friend.”
“She doesn’t have friends,” Lamb said. “She doesn’t like people.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but I heard the plaintiveness in my voice, and swallowed it.
The baby-faced doctor spread his hands as if to stay us. Despite their supple quality they were large, masculine. In an instant I imagined them wrapped around my neck. It was the heat of the room, the summer, the feeling of everything pressing in. Yet the air-conditioning was pumping audibly, and Lamb appeared comfortable enough in his long-sleeved chambray. I was the only one suddenly and persistently burning. Three times that week I had woken up in the middle of the night slick with sweat, moisture gathered underneath my breasts and in the creases of my arms and legs, my hair a damp tangle at the base of my neck. I dreamt of oranges floating on a pool.
“Isn’t there anyone else you might feel comfortable discussing your grandfather’s condition with?” His voice was gentle now, attempting kindness. I wanted to return it, but the word grandfather lay on the desk between us like one of the gophers Wolf caught on the grade, still punctured and mewling. It suggested a different type of man, the kind who kept caramels in his pocket for children.
“My grandfather still refuses to discuss his condition with me. My grandfather still smokes a pack a day. Did he tell you that?”
“Cale,” Lamb said testily, staring straight ahead. “Don’t be a shit.”
The doctor nodded. “Disease can be hardest on the ones we love. I’d be happy to recommend someone, a therapist I know very well.”
“Hah!” I glanced at Lamb. “He would never see a shrink.”
“I meant for you, actually. Or what if you both went, together?”
In the quiet room, the clock ticked behind us.
“Cale . . . as your grandfather’s physician, my job is to advise patients to seek the most effective course of treatment possible. What I can’t do, unfortunately, is force a patient to follow my recommendations. And without Mr. Lambert’s consent, I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss the particulars. But I can assure you we’ve reviewed a variety of treatment options—”
“You’re an oncologist, aren’t you?”
The doctor paused, his hands in midair.
“It’s on the door,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And it’s on the forms in the waiting room.”
He said nothing.
“Have you ever had a patient refuse to say the word? To tell his family he’s sick? To discuss it?”
The baby-faced doctor looked pained and there was a quick, commensurate sting behind my own eyes. Beside me, Lamb didn’t move. I looked down, studying my boots and the rich low-pile blue carpet woven with threads of gold. It was possible to distinguish the tight metallic strands, glinting under the lights. Maybe the doctor was right—maybe Lamb was—to place their faith in a myriad of rainbow-colored pills, to trust in the fine margin of milligrams, transfusions, a syringe, a scalpel, some opaque potion hung by a nurse from an IV pole. Maybe a rich place like this could unravel time.
“How can we even afford you?” I finally asked.
“You’re too young to understand,” Lamb said. “But the life insurance will hold you, if it comes to that.”
For a moment, the room was quiet again.
“Fuck you,” I said.
9
Pomoc entered the season of lazy feeling, men and women wearing T-shirts with lake-shaped patterns of moisture on their backs, schoolboys setting off firecrackers every afternoon, the tang of sulfur lingering for hours. I escaped periodically to the diner, where I stood hovering over the cashier’s desk, waiting for Rena to swoop out of the back room with her short ponytail pulled high, a pencil stuck behind one ear, directing me with short, stubby fingers to one of the booths where I might read undisturbed for an hour or more. Today the tables were empty, the booths, too. I walked up to the counter, a handful of regulars clogging the stools: ancient, crepe-skinned Tyrone Young, who would never die; Elvin Eckles, notorious for wandering up and down Main Street naked in the middle of the night, save for a pair of briefs and his headlamp; and a pair of heavyset truckers, presumably just passing through, whose gaze flickered between their yolky plates and Penny, leaning cross-armed against the counter, watching all the men eat their eggs with a withering expression I didn’t want to know anything about.
“Where’s Rena?” I asked her. I had seen her only once since school ended, standing in front of a display of candy bars at the drugstore, paralyzed by indecision. I knew Penny usually worked the overnight shifts, the trucker-heavy times when tips were better. Afternoons belonged to Rena and the slow, sad girl I didn’t know, who wore rubber hospital shoes that squeaked on the linoleum floor.
“Are you going to stand there all day waiting for her?”
“She lets me take a booth.”
“It’s just me today. If you want to eat, you have to join the rest of us.”
She knew it was enough to send me away, but I had nowhere else to go. I took one of the empty stools, setting my book next to the place setting. She passed me a sticky menu, chinning at it.
“What’s this one about?”
“Aliens,” I said. “Where is everyone today?”
“Too hot for them. You want your sundae?”
I scanned the menu as if I didn’t already know it by heart. Hearing her say it out loud, the sundae sounded childish, indulgent. It sounded exactly like what it was.
“Basket of fries. A Coke.”
“No sundae?”
“Not right now.”
She leaned back to repeat the order at the cook’s window, then disappeared down the counter, returning to set down the soda. She reached for my book before I could stop her and flipped it over. “A searing, kaleidoscopic portrait of the valiance of men amid the haunting decimation of war,” she read, amused. But in all the times I saw her around school with her friends, it couldn’t have escaped her attention that I didn’t have any.
“You can borrow it when I’m done,” I said.
“Actually, I can barely read. That’s why it’s lucky I’m so pretty.” She batted her eyelashes. Then, dropping the act, nodded at all the men on the stools, pretending to be focused on the game. “They’d believe it.”
Just then one of the truckers waved to her from the other end of the counter. I opened the book and tried to make sense of the same sentence over and over again, but I couldn’t concentrate. Eventually Penny returned, toting the fries and a bottle of ketchup. The fans above us were oscillating too slowly.
“Say there were aliens,” she said. “What do you think they’d do?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been working doubles every day since Rena’s gone,” Penny said, tilting her head meaningfully down the counter. Next to me, old Ty Young was staring glaze-eyed at the salt and pepper shakers between our plates, his mouth slightly parte
d, his napkin crumpled in the remains of his tomato soup. Elvin Eckles slurped his coffee. The truckers were talking among themselves at the end of the bar, the one closest to us sending the occasional hopeful look Penny’s way. “Give me something,” Penny said.
I picked up a fry, still too hot to eat. How did other people make small talk? I had nothing to say that wasn’t about this strange and persistent heat, the way Pomoc felt unbearable in it, the way I did, too. “I don’t know. I guess they’d want to go to Vegas, like everybody else.”
“Wow,” Penny said. “All those books. This is the best she can do.”
“Where is Rena?” It was the only thing I really wanted to know.
“Her husband got hit by a car.” The look on her face reminded me of Penny in the high school bathroom, the girl with the hooded eyes.
“Are you serious?” I took a long pull on my Coke. “That’s awful,” I said.
“Is it?” Penny sighed. “I don’t know. She was always stealing my tips. Now we get to hire someone else. What are you doing these days?”
“Me?”
“What, you don’t need a job? You’re in here all the time.”
“I just—what about your friends?”
“Please. They’ve got better things to do. No offense.”
“Aren’t there a bunch of other people who want to waitress here?”
“Everyone is old or so weird. Have you seen the other girl who works here, Clara? She’s even weirder than you.” Penny pulled a napkin out of the dispenser and laid it on the counter, clicking the pen from her apron. She pushed them both toward me. “Just write down your cell. I’ll have Jake call you.”
“I don’t have a cellphone.”
Penny studied me seriously for a moment, as if I were the alien from the book that didn’t exist, sprung to life. “Incredible,” she said.
“Can I ask why’d you ditch that quarter at Vista last year?”
“Why do you think?”
I picked up the pen. “I’m not sure. I thought you wanted to graduate with them.”
“Them?” Penny cocked an eyebrow.
“Your friends?”
She seemed to consider this, nodding slowly. She wasn’t going to tell me either way, I realized. I set the pen down. We stared at each other awhile.
“Jake will be here in an hour,” she said finally. “Just stay right there.”
10
I drove to the animal shelter and walked up and down the rows of dogs baying to be let out, desert dogs used to streaking across dry land and climbing wild. The first time I passed the cage the dog was sulking in the back corner, shoulders drawn down as if she might be able to disappear. She was a mutt but I recognized a pit terrier’s triangular head, the sinewy muscles bunched under her short coat. She wore the bright pink collar they put on the biters like an obnoxious next-day souvenir from a rave. On my second pass I asked them to unlock the cage.
At the sound of the key in the lock, she gathered herself into a tense pillar and growled. The information sheet next to her cage didn’t provide a name or age, the reason she had been left behind. They dragged her out, forcing her to sit down.
“Eleanor?” I asked her. “Louisa? Maya? Sacagawea? Muriel? Tomoe?”
The dog stood up, turned a circle, and sat down again with her back to me, facing the wall. Appalled by human beings, the inanity of our affairs.
“Trixie,” I said.
On the ride home she was quiet, sniffing herself first, then the truck; staring at Pomoc as we passed as if waking up from a long dream. When we arrived, Lamb was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper. Wolf ran up to the porch screen from outside, furious, pressing his nose into the net, barking up a storm. Lamb glanced at us, briefly. It was the same with the waitressing job, my backtalk, the new dog. I was floating things out, carving out the shape of a new permissibility. There were a number of things I could not say: I will take this and this and this. I will need things. This dog will be here if you cannot.
Lamb shook out the newspaper and cleared his throat, turning his attention back to the page. That was all.
35
There were three names listed under Cruz in the phone book, but I didn’t bother trying any of them. Ask Flaca. If Lourdes had been hostile to my call, Flaca, I knew, would hang up the minute she heard my name. I had always considered Penny their favorite; she was always the most admired in school, the one other girls strove to emulate. But Flaca was their backbone, the mainstay, the friend who dispensed favors and counsel. I decided to look for her in the one place I knew she would eventually be forced to return.
It was already dark when I left the diner, but I could have found my way to the palo blindfolded, even with all light stripped away. The Cruzes’ panadería was a flamingo pink storefront at the southernmost corner of a petite arc of businesses that included, among other things, a smoke shop and a laundromat. I parked the truck and climbed out as the barber was closing up for the night, unplugging the red and blue helix in the window, locking the door, rolling a hatched metal gate over the glass. He locked it, rattling the grille to make sure it was secured. Only the bakery stayed open late enough for workers returning from Sparks and Tehacama to drop off their lunch pails and tool kits at home, hunt their children from varied backyards, and corral them to the bakery for tortas and Cokes. As I walked to the entrance, a large blue van pulled up to the curb, unloading a dozen women in identical pressed white uniforms. These women were Pomoc’s illusionists, soon to be ferried out to office buildings and casinos and hospitals in southern cities, armed only with plastic bottles and brooms to toil unseen, tasked with erasing our collective past. I followed them inside and lingered near the wall opposite a glass case full of pan dulces tucked into neat, full rows. The women placed orders for tacos de piña, puerquitos, and coffee strong enough to power them through the evening into the pardoning dawn. Behind a small screen that separated her from customers, Maria’s short, corpulent figure bent to the glass case, shaking out one paper bag after another.
When I was a child, Lamb had brought me here so often that Maria often emerged from behind her veil-like screen. She clasped me against her supple bulk, flattening dexterous, flour-dusted fingers across my eyebrows and down the dark tails of my schoolgirl plaits, humoring Lamb with his awkward gringo patois while checking for my growth spurt that never seemed to arrive. Even after all these years her face was still full, a few strands of silver in her high, tight bun catching in the light. When the last of the uniformed women left, I unlatched myself from the wall and stepped up to the counter, searching Maria’s expression for some sense of recognition, an acknowledgment of the pigtailed tomboy who loved her. She nodded at me through the screen. “¿Qué quieres?”
“Is Christina here?”
“No.” Her reply was sharp, as if this was a question she’d been asked too often. Flaca’s business was growing, and it wasn’t hard to guess how many others might have shown up in recent months, seeking a dispensary.
“I just want to talk to her.”
“¿Quieres comprar algo?”
“I used to come here.” I held out my hand flat at my chest, indicating a child’s height. “This tall, overalls. I came with my grandfather. We sat over there.” I pointed to the corner table, the hard plastic chairs. She shrugged.
“You don’t remember me?” My voice sounded more desperate than I intended. What if I split my hair in braids again, if Lamb were beside me, if I clung to his rough hand the way I had then? Instead I pointed to a row of pink conchas behind the glass, as if nostalgia might stir Lamb’s dwindling appetite. “Cuatro, por favor.”
She reached for a pastry box and laid the conchas down like sleeping children. I paid and on my way out, held the door for a father shepherding inside twin girls, the pair of them in light-up princess sneakers and vague, kittenish smiles. Outside, I stopped at the truck and slid the pastry bo
x on the hood to fish the keys out of my pocket when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a mouse dart out from underneath a nearby car, scurrying along the side of the building to the dumpsters crowding the small back alley. Lamb and I had wandered there more than once to discard our trash, and I knew at the end of the alley lay the bakery’s kitchen where, during any weekday lull, Maria could be found chatting with any number of family members who cycled through to mix dough and answer the phone, transcribing elaborate cake orders. I settled the pastry box in the passenger seat of the truck before shutting the door and picking my way into the dark passage, edging past the dumpsters. Halfway down I could make out a square of light on the brick wall opposite, the top half of the kitchen’s Dutch door pushed open, giving off a backdraft of heat. I peeked in past the tall, silver rolling racks of pastries pulled away from the wall, the working counters covered with bags of yeast, mixing bowls, rows of sweet breads cooling on wire racks. A fan in the corner of the room rattled as it worked, its face pushed up toward the ceiling to keep from blowing flour into powdered mist. A slim girl, her back turned to me, pulled open the top door of an oven, sliding a baking tray inside. She shut it and moved to lean over the fan, shaking out the bottom of the tank top that clung to her, a red bandanna tying back her hair.
“Flaca,” I called her name softly. She made no movement to signal she heard, but a moment later, a familiar pair of hard, dark eyes pinned mine. She crossed the room and reached for the Dutch door, her face already forming a scowl. I took a step back, one foot into the dirt. A voice called out something indecipherable from the other room.
“Nadie, Mama,” Flaca called back. She jutted her chin at me. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Me? About what?”
“What else? Penny.”
Flaca studied me with an expression I didn’t know how to read. She pushed the door open wider for me to catch, but once inside reached for me so quickly I didn’t have time to pull away. She caught my jaw in her firm grip, moving my face back and forth carefully in the light as if it were a ruby or disaster, something to be appraised. Her breath tickled my chin. This, the closest we had ever been to each other, even as girls.
A Prayer for Travelers Page 4