Even though they’d gone to bed at three in the morning, Diane woke at dawn. She thought about letting Colin sleep while she sat in the lobby with a newspaper, but the thought of the two of them, packed up in the car and heading west, flushed her neck with heat. How the sun would look in the rearview mirror, still orange as though it was groggy from sleep; how she could pretend she was outrunning it; how when they got to the next town they could fill up on gas, doughnuts, shitty coffee—who wouldn’t want this? Who could dream something better? “This is wonderful,” she told Colin as he tried to burrow back under the covers. She poked him under the ribs until he got out of bed.
The first glimpse of the desert came just before noon, when they crossed from the Oklahoma Panhandle into New Mexico. “Not cactus desert,” she explained. “Just sagebrush. Tumbleweeds and dirt.” Far away they could see bands of lavender she called mountains, which might have been clouds. In some western states, she reminded herself, you could see for a hundred miles. Whenever the highway curved toward the slightest overlook she slowed so she could stare off into the distance. Rarely was there any proof of civilization at all, and Colin had to ask why she was smiling like an idiot.
In Clayton they had a late breakfast, driving up and down empty streets until they found an old hotel. The pipes hissing in the walls and the way the waitress tottered to the side made her think they’d have to gag down their eggs and pancakes, but everything was delicious. Colin ate as if she’d starved him for a month, ordering a plate of sausages when she tried to ask for the check. She let him try her coffee and he made puking motions with his hand over his mouth. “You have good taste,” she whispered. “They may have good food but their coffee’s shit.” She drank what was left in one gulp and asked for more.
“I hope you’re having a good time,” she told Colin as the waitress brought another short stack—on the house, she said, with a hand on his shoulder. He was hunched over his plate with his fork in his fist like a child. He didn’t even bother to lift his eyes while he chewed. She noticed an ashtray nestled between the condiments. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said, as though someone had offered. She’d known, maybe, that this was the only way to get a response out of him. It wasn’t every cigarette, anymore, but when he was right in front of her it never failed. When he held out the flame she smiled and said again, “I hope you’re having a good time.”
“I guess so.” He looked around the dining room. Everything was that color you could tell was once blue. Even the tiles on the floor, scraped and cracked into a dimpled chalk, had little bits poking through that were still the color of a hazy afternoon. It felt weird to be there, he thought, his mother across from him with her elbows on the table, with her cigarette smoke. They might as well be at their kitchen table back home, arguing over what to do while they were on vacation. But outside it was too big. Even the country in Minnesota was smaller, boxed in by fences, filled with cows and the occasional tail-twitch of a horse. Everywhere you looked was a billboard, a silo, an outlet mall. Even the abandoned barns, their roofs sagging like giants had rested there, had next to them new barns, a cleared spot of land for pigs, a massive FOR SALE sign that wouldn’t be there the next time they drove out of town. Here, the abandoned barn’s equivalent was a pile of rubble—splintered lumber and stones—nestled all by itself in the yellow spot between two hills where, he guessed, plants grew in the spring. It was terrifying.
Santa Fe was the first place she said she could live. It was still early in the evening and they could’ve driven—he said, measuring a stretch of freeway with his thumb—at least as far as Albuquerque. “Part of traveling is to get a feel for places,” she said. He was trying not to get her lost but it wasn’t working. He couldn’t stop looking in the rearview mirror.
Santa Fe was also the first place he saw a black Toyota.
It followed them for a while, when they first drove into the city. Colin hadn’t paid any attention to the car until it took a sharp right—only seconds after his mother had pointed up at a hotel. He wished he would’ve been more alert, more vigilant. Of course Victor had pursued him. Why wouldn’t he get what he’d always wanted? As they circled around the block Colin looked up and down every street. He locked his door as they pulled into a spot behind the building. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll ask about rates.” He watched her cross the lot to the rear door. The thought of Victor—standing right outside the car window and pointing at the lock—was so real he could taste it. He knew he’d unlock the door for him, like a child who would no longer disobey, who would offer himself for punishment. And Victor would be so disappointed that Colin had lied about where in California they were headed.
At dinner, she said it again: “I could live here.” They’d walked from the hotel to a steakhouse the concierge had recommended. The sidewalks were narrow and they had to walk single file. Whenever Colin looked back, his mother was taking something in—a school done in pink adobe, its windows black as the sun prepared itself to set, or someone’s front garden of yucca and sharp flowers. “I just think it’s a beautiful place. Not even that, maybe, but a place where they didn’t forget to make it beautiful. You know? So much of the Midwest is…” She flicked her hand in the air as if to bait and hook the right word. “It’s such an afterthought. You know, here’s this nineteenth-century church, you don’t think anyone will mind if we build a concrete cube next to it, right? It’s a joke.”
“It has rules,” Colin said. He had interlaced the tines of his two forks and was rocking them back and forth. “You’re not allowed to build anything if you don’t use the mud brick stuff.”
“Adobe.”
He knew the word. It just sounded stupid and he refused to say it.
The restaurant was quiet. The mariachi music was turned down so low that all you heard was a little groan of brass now and then, easily mistaken for a creaky door. Most of the tables were empty. “I just get the feeling—” she began. When he didn’t look up at her she reached over and unhooked the forks so they lay flat. “I get the feeling that life here is very laid back. Like nobody’s trying to figure you out and they’re not worried about you.”
“Like no one cares?” He picked up the forks and held them away from her.
“Knock it off.”
“What? I’m bored.”
“So take advantage of the conversation your mother is trying to have. Jesus.” She leaned back in the booth.
He could feel her leg shaking under the table—spasms from too much unused energy. “You really want to live out here? It’s just dirt.”
“It’s more than dirt. There’s mountains. The sky goes on forever. That’s not exciting?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
She ordered a glass of wine—“Whatever you recommend,” she said with a smile Colin could tell was fake. He looked out the window while the waiter explained where each wine came from, using words like fruity and earthy and tannic. I’ll have a nice tall glass of dirt, Colin thought, and he buried his face in his shoulder so she wouldn’t see him smile.
“What’s wrong?” she asked after the waiter left. “Are you okay?”
He turned back to her with one eye squinted shut, the opposite eyebrow raised in an arch. “Yeah-yus,” he said. “I’ll uh-have the-uh, Earthy Cabernet, uh, ’78. I do hope it, uh, tastes like dirt. If you please-uh.”
By the time their food came they were both red in the face and wiping tears from their eyes. “We’ll move here,” she said between gasps of breath, her hand trembling as she drizzled vinaigrette over her salad. “We’ll buy a ranch and see how much money we can make from selling fermented dirt.” She tried to do the silly voice. “It’ll be-uh, very-uh grand.” It didn’t sound anything like it was supposed to, but he didn’t want to correct her.
The next place she loved was Seneca Lake. He’d insisted they drive from Albuquerque down to Socorro and go west from there. He’d seen the Very Large Array marked as a “place of interest” on the map and recognized the name from mo
vies, all those radio telescopes pointed at the sky. By the time they left the hotel he had the entire fantasy played out—parking on the side of the road and using his mother’s phone to send pictures back to Andy, as though he’d walked right onto a movie set. Andy wouldn’t recognize the number, but he’d know deep down who it was. Andy would know, Colin decided, how cruel he’d been, and he would know that if he only apologized they could forget the last year. But whenever Colin imagined Andy’s long walk over to his house, his knock at the door—the whole uncomplicated ritual of boy forgiveness—he infected it with the afterimage of him and Andy out of breath on his bed, each too tired to untangle himself from the other. In reality, the VLA facility looked like a pasture sparse with gangly white animals. Only one telescope was close enough to the highway to make out as a telescope. The rest could have been the strange deer that kept leaping over the roadside fences. “Do you want to stop for a picture?” she asked as he strained to see through the driver’s side window.
He slumped back in his seat. “What’s the point?” Out the other window was another stretch of desert, wavy with sunlight. Maybe he could tear the page out of the map and write, I WAS HERE, and mail it back at the next post office. But it was the kind of thing that Andy would just throw over his shoulder for his mom to clean up. Too hard to figure out. Not worth his time. Or maybe he would understand who sent it, and understand—when for some reason Colin could not—how you couldn’t be friends with someone who, at the most halfhearted command, would drop to his knees. Colin shifted in his seat. He hadn’t been sufficiently alone for three days.
After the VLA, there wasn’t much except desert. Mountains had gathered to wait along the skyline. “So beautiful out here,” she said every half hour, pointing to a dried-up gulch or the crevice between two hills, thick with sagebrush. He was bored and everything was beginning to look sexual. He tried to scare himself by thinking of the black Toyota he’d seen in Santa Fe, but it wasn’t fright he felt when he imagined the phone call—Victor asking where they’d been, what they’d seen. Not a lot of privacy, Victor would say, and with his eyes closed in his mother’s car Colin let out a soft breath of air, a groan without the groan, and let his lips imagine the taste of the dewdrop Victor would feed him before he made him beg to go on. “Arizona!” his mother shouted, and Colin’s eyes flicked open to a smeared-white sky hovering over a smeared landscape, his heart beating so hard he had to look down at his shoes to catch his breath.
“I think I need a long shower tonight,” he said. “I smell funny.”
She pinched a cigarette from a fresh pack and leaned toward him, her eyes still on the road. While he searched for his lighter she made a sniffing sound. “Well, I’ll be damned. It is you. Here I thought it was the cheese I bought for lunch.”
He bit down on his smile. “Shut up.” As he held the flame for her he kicked off his shoes. “I’ll show you cheese smell,” he said, and after her first drag she made a face as though she was trying not to puke. “This a bad time to say I forgot deodorant?” He raised his arms with a long ahhh sound as if relaxing, but he realized that his T-shirt was too small and you could see the little tufts of down that’d grown there. He put his arms at his sides and turned to look at the bags in the backseat. “You don’t really have cheese, do you? I’m starving.”
She was still laughing to herself, ashing out the open window. “There’s no cheese. But we could stop somewhere, if you want. What’s the next big city?”
He flipped to Arizona. “Uh…” He followed their highway as it dipped down into a large green patch, dotted with points of interest. “Nowhere? I guess Phoenix, but that’s hours away. I’ll be dead by then. We’re about to head into the Apache National Forest. It looks big.”
“Even better. What’s the best way through it?”
“The quickest?”
“No. Like the prettiest. What’re all those pink dots?” She gestured at the atlas with her cigarette. A dusting of ash fell onto the page, immediately swept up and out the window.
“Take the 77 when you get to Show Low.”
“Show Low.” She smiled as the wind pulled smoke from her mouth. With her free hand she reached out and felt for his shoulder, his neck. She ran a hand through his hair as he tried to get away. “I’m so glad we did this.” You could tell it wasn’t one of those things she said just to change her own mind.
The shadows were long by the time they caught their first sight of the canyon, not far from Seneca Lake. The road dipped down to the river, switchbacking to drop what must be—she kept saying—half a mile straight down. Colin put his hands on the dash, screaming at her to slow down. When he looked over at the guardrail he could see patches of river still lit by the sun.
“Didn’t think you’d be afraid of heights,” she said.
“I’m not afraid of heights. I just don’t wanna die.”
“We’re not gonna die.” She patted the steering wheel with her wrist. “Look, no hands,” she said, and she burst out laughing when he turned and saw both of her hands firmly on the wheel. “Relax. Just look at all this. Couldn’t you see us living here? In one of those houses on stilts maybe, right on the side of the mountain?”
“Just wait till there’s an earthquake.”
“Are there earthquakes in the desert?” She pointed over his shoulder at a house built on the summit of a hill. “There! Like that one.”
“Of course there’s earthquakes. Slow down! God.”
“Can you imagine what the stars must look like here?”
“Slow down!”
“There’s already a line of cars behind me. You don’t want to be that car, do you? The losers from Minnesota who can’t drive?” She eased her foot off the brake as they came close to another pass. “There we go,” she said as the car whipped around the curve. “This could be my commute. Driving every day and seeing all this. Can you imagine?”
“I’d kill myself.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Or buy a helicopter.” He let himself peek out over the edge. They were close to the river now. All this for a single bridge, not much longer than a railcar. They crossed it in seconds, and it took nearly an hour to climb the switchbacks waiting on the other side.
They ate McDonald’s in a town called Globe, right in the middle of the mountains as if someone had dropped it there and couldn’t reach down into the cracks to fish it out. What little of the sky they could see had flushed pink. As they ate in the parking lot they could hear the breeze push away the day’s heat. By the time they finished their fries Colin was shivering in his T-shirt. “Roll up the stupid windows.”
She ignored him. “I think we’ll sleep in Phoenix. A place with a sauna, since you’ve decided to bring—let me guess—shorts, jeans, and…what? Three T-shirts?”
“It’s the f…I mean the stupid desert.”
“Colin.”
“What? I didn’t say fuck. But it’s the desert. You know. Hot. Sunny. You have to hide in the shade or you die. We’ve had the stupid AC on all day.”
The car bounced as she pulled back onto the highway. “You’re the one who told me it gets cold, doofus. For a while you were a little encyclopedia. In the desert this, in San Francisco that. Interesting how you get amnesia the second you face some responsibility.”
She hated Phoenix, she concluded once they arrived, and refused to sleep there. “Big, boring, and ugly,” she repeated to herself as he thumbed through the atlas, tilting it toward his window so he could decipher one city and highway at a time in each streetlight’s flash. “You want I-10 west,” he told her. “It’ll take you straight to LA. Maybe we could—”
“Where’s the Grand Canyon?”
“North?”
“How would we get there? Sometime tomorrow.”
“You want I-17. It goes up to Flagstaff, then you go a little west until…I can’t read this. You won’t let me turn on the light.”
She turned on the light.
“You go west until a town called
Williams. Then north a bit, and it dumps you right in the park.” He reached up and switched off the light. She’d scared him, years ago, into believing that switching on the light while she was driving would blind her and they’d die within seconds.
It was close to eleven when the last lights of the Phoenix metro disappeared. Eating had made him tired and he reclined the seat. He was careful, out of instinct, not to bump into his brother in the backseat, and as he watched the signs flit by above him he was sad. Agua Fria. Camp Verde. Sedona. Sleep, he commanded himself, but instead he thought of Victor. How could he have believed he’d left him behind? How could you hope that going out of town would keep you out of danger? He wondered if, in the rearview mirror, his mother could see the headlights of a black Toyota. His brain took him places that weren’t even erotic, only terrifying. Their brakes failing. The car overheating because of some sabotage. Victor would eliminate his mother so he could have Colin all to himself, and for that Colin already felt guilty. His mother begging for her life, knowing, at the same time, what kind of son she really had, the one in whom she’d placed her hopes—how could he have done this? How could he have lured her out here? Victor was the kind of man who’d carry a gun in the glove compartment. Out in the desert, nobody paid attention to these things. She’d scream as he aimed it, but that wouldn’t stop him from firing, nor could it prevent the silence after, when Victor glanced over at him, maybe with a grin. Picturing this future, he began to sob, doing everything he could to control his breathing, to let his tears glide to the corners of his lips where he licked them back into his body. It went beyond his father, he realized. His selfishness, his depravity—he would kill them all.
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