21
Leah
The moon had set a long time ago, but the stars seemed to go on forever, even looking at them from here on the edge of town.
After the long drive, Leah and Marisa had rented a room at the Silver Spur Motel, a long adobe building that had obviously seen better days, but the rooms were surprisingly clean and there was even free WiFi. There were about a dozen units, a third of which had vehicles parked in front. Most were so rusted and beat up they made their own economy rental look like a showroom car.
Marisa hadn’t even bothered to look around the room. As soon as they’d brought their bags in from the car, she’d commandeered one of the twin beds, stripped to a T-shirt, and crawled under the sheets, asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.
Leah wasn’t that tired since she’d grabbed a few catnaps on the drive down. When they’d first set out, she kept trying to force herself to stay awake until Marisa had finally noticed and told her to stop fighting it.
“Remember, I slept on the plane,” Marisa had said.
It was true. Leah had envied the way Marisa just dropped off, not waking until the pilot’s announcement came over the intercom, welcoming them to Las Vegas.
“But it’s such a long drive,” Leah had argued. “It seems unfair that you shouldn’t at least have someone to talk to.”
“You’re the one that needs to be alert in the morning,” Marisa’d told her. “I’m only the chauffeur.”
So the next time Leah had felt her eyelids drooping, she’d let sleep come.
Now it was Marisa’s turn to be dead to the world while Leah was wide awake.
She sent Alan a text to tell him they’d arrived. She gave him the name of the motel and said that Marisa was sleeping, so she’d call him in the morning. Then, taking a pen and one of her spiral-bound notebooks from her luggage, she went outside and sat at a little rusted metal table and chair beside the door. There was enough illumination from the light over the threshold, so she thought she’d write up some notes about the trip thus far. Half an hour later, all she’d done was gaze at the stars and listen to the desert night.
It was so different here from back home, dissimilar in every way. The plants were alien, the smells unfamiliar. Even the night sky looked all wrong. She felt as though she were on another planet, or in some badlands version of fairyland.
But the odd thing was, she didn’t feel out of place. On the drive down from Vegas, with the headlights picking out unusual land formations and the even less familiar plant life, she’d felt welcomed. She couldn’t wait for the sun to rise so she could really see her surroundings properly.
Their motel was on the southwest side of Santo del Vado Viejo, at the edge of town. There was a lot of desert scrub around the motel—some of it just undeveloped land, and some ranches, but it still felt like they were driving through the desert. The Kikimi rez was to the west in the Hierro Maderas Mountains, surrounded by a national park. She’d already taken a walk around the building to get a glimpse of the mountains, but they were only a dark shape on the western horizon.
Right now, she had to make do with the tall saguaro that towered not far from where she sat, and some raggedy prickly pear clustered against the side of the building.
If Jackson Cole really was alive and had chosen this area to disappear into, she was beginning to understand why. Even in the dark there was something primal, yet spiritually uplifting about her surroundings, and she found herself wishing she didn’t have a flight back in a couple of days. Now that she was here, she itched to get out and explore the area in depth.
Maybe with the advance she was getting from Alan she could afford to stay out here to work on the book. Speaking of which...
She pulled her notebook closer to her and picked up the pen again. But instead of writing about the trip or her surroundings, or even the email that had brought her here, she found herself writing down an all too familiar name:
Aimee Leigh.
She supposed it wasn’t so surprising that Aimee would be on her mind, considering the reason she’d come out here, all these miles from home. But it made her stop and consider the wisdom of writing the book that Alan wanted from her.
There’s this opportunity to tie in to all the things that first drew you to the Rats, and how writing about them changed you—a more personal journey to complement what you’ve already written about Cole and the band.
Did she really want to go there?
Every time someone asked her when she’d gotten into the Diesel Rats, she always told them that she’d loved the band for as long as she could remember. That even though the music was already fifteen or so years old when she was a kid, it spoke to her in a way that her own era of music—the eighties—didn’t.
But that wasn’t quite true, or at least it wasn’t her truth. It was Aimee’s. The only reason Leah had tolerated the Rats back then was because Aimee was her best friend, and Aimee had adored the band.
Though Leah had secretly preferred the music of their time—all those synthesized keyboards and horribly produced drums she couldn’t listen to now—it hadn’t mattered because in those days, Aimee’s passion for the Rats had somehow trumped everything.
Sure, the Rats had glorious harmonies, great upbeat songs, and hooks that you just couldn’t forget. But their music belonged to her parents’ generation, like The Beatles or Elvis Presley. So, as Leah yearned for music she could claim as her own, she groaned inwardly every time Aimee pulled out one of the Rats’ albums, or worse, one of their dodgy bootlegs with the bad sound and worse covers made up of faded Xeroxed collages.
* * *
That all changed when Aimee died.
All these years later, that depressing fact could still take her by surprise.
She and Aimee had lived next door to each other and been pretty much inseparable from when they could walk. It was a friendship significant for its complete lack of drama. Even their arguments over the Rats had been good-natured because most of the time, they were completely in sync. They were going to conquer the world together. How, they didn’t know. They just knew they’d be standing side by side when they did.
Except Aimee wasn’t even twenty when she’d drowned in the Kickaha River down by the Butler University Common. All anyone knew was she’d died alone, some time between midnight and sunrise.
The police investigators ruled it a suicide.
Leah had refused to believe it. She’d never have used the word ‘depressed’ to describe her best friend. But then the journal Aimee’s parents had given their daughter the year before she died surfaced.
Leah didn’t recognize the Aimee who wrote those entries.
She recognized the handwriting and the people Aimee talked about. She’d even been at most of the events she’d described, but they were unrecognizable seen through the eyes of the Aimee writing in her journal. Like a poetry slam at Kathryn’s Café they’d gone to with a bunch of friends. It had been a really fun night with lots of joking and laughing until this one poet just floored them with the intensity of his words and heartfelt delivery. At the time, they’d all been swooning with crushes on him.
In the journal, Aimee barely wrote about the slam. Instead she filled a couple of pages questioning what everybody was thinking about her, what this significant glance had meant, whether that innocuous comment had been a diss.
The journal held endless variations of the same. No matter how benign the situation, Aimee’s perception of it was that everybody was judging her and finding her lacking. She kept asking over and over again: Why was she alive? What use was she?
The final entry in her journal transcribed a partial lyric from the Rats’ song “Save Me”:
If I coulda saved you, saved you, saved you;
You just woulda played me, played me, played me.
Losing her best friend was like losing her right arm, and reading the journal sank Leah deep into a depression of her own. It was as though the Aimee she’d grown up with had been a phantom
of her imagination.
Ironically, it was the Diesel Rats that pulled Leah out. She started out listening to them to try and figure out why their music couldn’t have saved Aimee, only to find that it was able save her.
So why not Aimee?
If Jackson Cole actually was alive, that was the one question she’d want to ask him, but she didn’t think he’d have an answer either.
The question she’d asked herself most was: Why hadn’t she seen what was going on? How good a friend could she have been to have missed Aimee’s self-doubt and torment?
Leah’s guilt still lingered all these years later. Would spewing this mess onto paper do anybody any good? It certainly wouldn’t be the book that Alan was counting on.
She started writing all of this down—memories and questions both—and didn’t look up until she heard the sound of an engine. Closing her notebook with her pen inside to keep her place, she watched a beat up old pickup truck pull into the motel’s parking lot.
She had a moment to wonder if she was safe sitting out here by herself, without even the flimsy door of the motel room between her and the two men she could see in the pickup. But it was too late to bolt because the headlights picked her out, blinding her for a moment before the vehicle pulled in closer, then came to a stop.
The passenger’s door opened and one of the men got out. He exchanged a few rapid-fire phrases in Spanish with the driver, then closed the door. The truck pulled away and the stranger gave Leah a curious glance. He was white, maybe in his late fifties, tall and in good shape, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a blue flannel shirt with a fringed leather vest overtop. Everything about him had seen a lot of wear, from his weathered face to his clothes. As he walked in her direction Leah knew a moment of fear. He seemed to sense her discomfort because he stopped a few yards away.
“Ma’am,” he said and tipped a finger to his brow. “You’re up late—or early, I suppose, depending.”
Ma’am? Leah thought. She was at least twenty years younger than him. She had time to hope he was just being polite, and then he smiled, which made his whole face light up. The tension eased in her shoulders.
“I slept for a lot of the drive down from Las Vegas,” she said, “so I thought I might as well do a little work since it’s too dark to go for a walk.”
“You’re from Vegas?”
She shook her head. “From Newford. It’s just a cheaper flight to Vegas, even with the car rental.”
“I hear you. Me, I’m from right here at the Silver Spur Motel, room number ten. Name’s Ernie.”
“I’m Leah. And you’re either up late or early yourself.”
“Guilty as charged.” He studied Leah for a moment, his gaze dropping to her notebook, before he added, “What kind of work do you do?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Journalist?”
“Sort of. I’ve written a bit on social politics, but mostly I write about music. What about you? And please.” She indicated the free chair. “Have a seat. I’d offer you a coffee, but...”
“Jerry’s Roadhouse opens in a couple of hours,” he said, waving a hand in what she assumed was the direction of the restaurant. “They’ve got good coffee, good food.”
He sat down across from her, leaning back in his chair. “So you’re here on a story?”
“I’m not sure. I’m looking for a guy who used to be in a band back in the sixties, but honestly, I doubt I’m going to find him.”
“What’s his name?”
Leah didn’t know how to answer that. It was unlikely he’d know anything about Jackson Cole’s whereabouts, and even less likely that he was plugged in to one of the Internet gossip sites, but she didn’t want even a whisper of this story to get out. Because if Cole was alive, it would be the story of the century. Right up there with proving that Elvis wasn’t dead.
Again he picked up on her discomfort. “Hey, don’t worry. I know you reporters need to keep your scoops close to the vest. I was just making conversation.”
“I’m not really a reporter,” she said.
“You’re a journalist—right. I’ve got a story for you. You hear much about migrants back in Newford?”
“You mean the illegals?”
“Yeah, nobody likes that term.”
Leah nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind. But to answer your question, I did a piece on Malo Malo last year when they came through town in support of Los Lobos. They were telling me how they get stopped and asked for papers all the time, even though they were all born and grew up here.”
“That’s become a pretty common story,” he said. “But I was thinking more of the undocumented migrants. The ones who get across the border and try to make a new life for themselves stateside. The problem is, a lot of them don’t understand just how brutal the desert can be. The only time they get on the news is when there’s a bust, or they’re found dead in the desert. Even then, it gets buried in the back of the paper and rarely makes the six o’clock.”
He paused for a moment, then added, “And let me tell you, a whole lot of them die out there—from dehydration in the summer, or freezing in the winter. Not just men. Women and children, too.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He put his hands behind his head and looked up at the stars. “Yeah, it’s not really First World news, is it? They’re trying to escape poverty and living under the threat of the cartels, coming here to work the shit jobs we don’t want, but if you listen to some people, you’d think they were Satan’s spawn, good for nothing except to be drug runners and whores. Except when you meet them and talk to them, you realize they’re just desperate people looking for better lives for themselves and their families. And isn’t that what America’s all about? Everybody here’s an immigrant—except for the Indians, and hell, they came from someplace else themselves, just a longer time ago.”
His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, but passion burned in his eyes.
He refocused his gaze on Leah. “Sorry,” he said. “I just get going sometimes. I know whatever story brought you here must be important to you, but what’s happening to these people is a story that needs telling too, especially by white voices since nobody’s going to listen when it’s told by someone with brown skin.”
“No, that’s okay,” Leah told him. “It’s...” Interesting, she was going to say, but that was almost patronizing. She settled on, “It’s tragic. I’ve never really understood xenophobia.”
He gave her a blank look.
“Fear of foreigners,” she said. “Racism. I honestly don’t understand it.”
“You and me both.” He stood up, pushing his chair back from the table. “I should hit the sack. It was nice talking with you, Leah. Sorry for bending your ear like that. I hope your story works out for you.”
She smiled. “Me too.”
As she watched him walk down to his room, she opened her notebook again and thought about the things he’d been telling her. Pen in hand, she began to write, asking the questions on paper, where perhaps they’d make a little more sense instead of having them bang around inside her head.
What made a rock star faking his own death—if that was the real story here—more important than these people Ernie said were dying in the desert? It wasn’t, of course, but she knew which story would soar into the blogosphere, and which wouldn’t.
And yes, if that big story was going to happen, she wanted a piece of it. But that wasn’t the only reason she was pursuing it. It wasn’t even to ask why the Rats’ music hadn’t been enough to keep Aimee alive. Not anymore. Now she was just as invested as any Diesel Rats fan. More so, perhaps.
She certainly knew more about them than most people. She’d researched and written so much about them—interviewed countless friends, acquaintances and many of the people who’d worked with the band. She listened to their music with more of a discerning ear because, beyond the records and bootlegs, she’d been privy to early demos, studio outtakes and otherwise unavailable concert recordings that�
�impossible as it might seem—still hadn’t made it onto the Internet’s pirate sites.
She probably knew the Rats better than she knew her own friends. And that was why she couldn’t dismiss the idea of Jackson Cole finding a way to make the world believe he was dead so that he could start over. He’d been through so much toward the end. She thought he would have been stronger, but no matter how much research you did—how many stories you read, how much music you listened to—you could never actually get inside another person’s head.
She closed the notebook, got up and stretched. The sky seemed a little lighter to the east, but she didn’t have the energy to walk around the motel again to wait up and watch the sunrise.
She had a long day ahead of her and for once she’d do the sensible thing and try to get a couple of hours’ rest before they drove out to the rez.
22
Steve
My stomach does a little flip as we step away from Sammy’s office. I’d like to say I’m getting used to this mode of travel, but so far, every time it happens I feel a little more freaked out. It hits me like a hammer in my gut that tells me nothing is necessarily as it appears and leaves me grasping for something—anything—to ground myself. But it’s impossible to do when, in a heartbeat, I’ve stepped from an interior office to the top of a high red rock ridge with the mountains washing away in all directions like a vast ocean of stone.
I let go of Calico’s hand and grab hold of the nearest boulder, waiting for the feeling to go away.
Calico chuckles. “You’ll get used to it,” she says.
“Says you.”
“Because it’s true. You’ve been doing this for years—you just didn’t know it. Now it’s just time for your brain to catch up with what the rest of you already knows.”
“The rest of me is what’s got me feeling unsteady on my feet,” I tell her.
The Wind in His Heart Page 12