Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “No!”

  “Then what are you going for, exactly?”

  “The truth,” I said.

  She nodded without seeming to agree with me and turned back to the screen. “Of course, the quality is excellent, no problems there—oh, wait.”

  “What?” I sounded testy, and I didn’t care.

  “I love this.”

  She was looking at Elena Sanchez, face pressed to the car window.

  “Now, I can see something in her,” Frances said. “It goes deeper than just ‘I’m poor and I want somebody to pay my bills.’ What’s her story, do you know?”

  My mouth went dry. “I’ve only just started talking to her.”

  “Well, talk to her some more. I think this is what you need, right here.” She pushed back from the desk with her palms and sat straight-armed. “Right now you’re only at about second base with this story. She can get you a home run. Otherwise I think you might strike out.” Frances gave herself a wry look. “I’ll be glad when the play-offs are over. I’m starting to talk like a sports commentator.”

  She dismissed me by turning back to the police scanner. “Have a nice weekend,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m letting you out of shooting the Whole Enchilada Festival.”

  I gave Elena Sanchez one more long look before I turned off my laptop.

  By the time we reached the White Sands National Monument, I was over J.P. Winslow. Done. Ready to turn around and head back to Las Cruces barefoot, with all four of our packs on my back.

  All the way there, while she was driving, she went through a memorized checklist of everything we were supposed to have brought. She chewed Victoria out for spacing out on the matches, and proclaimed what a good thing it was that she herself had brought extras. That went for the hand sanitizer Poco had left behind and the trash bags I didn’t even know I was supposed to have packed.

  I wondered silently why she’d even bothered to give assignments if she was going to bring everything anyway. I only kept that to myself because Poco was looking a little like, as my mother would have said, a sheep-killin’ dog. Once she was royally reamed for the hand sanitizer faux pas, she stopped trying to make happy conversation. That left J.P. to carry on for the remaining twenty minutes of the ride with a tirade about Cade’s teacher.

  So, yes, upon arrival, I would cheerfully have hiked over San Augustin Pass and traversed the Organ Mountains with the coyotes to get away from J.P. Winslow. The only thing that held me back was the challenge in her eyes when I caught her looking at me. There were too many other tests in my life just then that I couldn’t seem to pass. Hers I could ace with both hands tied behind my back. And I had to, for the sake of my eroding self-esteem.

  J.P. left the engine on in the Suburban as she opened the door in the parking lot.

  “I’ll go in and sign us up for the sunset tour,” she said. “There’s no point in all of us going in.”

  I opened my door and climbed out. “I’m going to have a look around.”

  “Don’t go far. I’m only going to be about five minutes.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said.

  I wasn’t all that interested in the assortment of bizarre cacti planted in front of the building, but I wandered among them anyway. The plaques informed me that once I got into the dunes themselves, I would see little vegetation, because they moved too fast for plants to grow.

  The dunes moved? In spite of myself I found that sort of intriguing. An image came to mind of ghostly mounds of sand marching across the desert—but to what destination? And why? That was the part that nettled me, I realized. The sense of drift, the lack of purpose. It occurred to me that Dan must love it out here.

  I smacked myself internally and forced my focus onto the next sign. My eyes immediately glazed over the whole business about the crystallized form of gypsum from the evaporation of Lake Lucero that broke down into grains of sand and was blown across the Tularosa Basin, where it piled into dunes.

  “That people pay to walk around on it,” I muttered, “and then buy a T-shirt that says they’ve been there.”

  “We need to get going.”

  I looked up at J.P., who was standing on the gravel walkway, tapping a brochure against her leg.

  “Poco and Victoria went in to use the restroom,” she said. Her pointed look indicated that I might want to do the same.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “There aren’t any toilets out there.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Then you probably aren’t drinking enough water. I’m not interested in carrying you out if you get dehydrated, and it can happen like that out there.” She snapped her fingers.

  Poco and Victoria joined us in the car, and we passed through the gate, where J.P. collected a buck fifty from each of us to cover the entrance fee. As we continued down the paved but sand-dusted road and passed the last of the yuccas and the creosotes and the bear grass, I had the suffocating sense of being at a point of no return. Especially when the only living thing left to see was the occasional burst of orange at the top of a stark-white dune.

  “I thought nothing could grow out here,” I said, as much to make sure I still existed as to get information.

  “That’s the top of a Rio Grande cottonwood tree,” Victoria said.

  I turned to stare at her. She sounded like an excited little girl.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Oh yes. It’s been buried by the dune over time, but it can survive as long as some leaves are exposed.” She almost pressed her nose to the glass. “Isn’t it stunning? Oh, and see, that’s the tip of a yucca. You only see about two feet of it, but there could be thirty feet under the sand.”

  Obviously mistaking my disbelief for burgeoning interest in desert foliage, she got up on one knee and pointed. “You see that pedestal of sand there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s the trunk of a tree that has held on to the gypsum when the dune moved on. That’s good, because it provides food and shelter for the animals.”

  “Animals?” I said. “What could live in this?”

  “Little kangaroo rats and Apache pocket mice. I’ve even seen a kit fox and a couple of weasels. Only one snake.”

  I watched, amused, as Victoria clapped her hands.

  “They’re all nocturnal, so we may see some tonight.”

  “Hopefully not the snake.” Poco’s nervous giggle was back.

  “But the best, the best, is the bleached lizard. It totally matches the sand. We might see one, or we might just see its footprints in the morning. I like that even better—it’s like seeing that fairies have been here.”

  Victoria hugged her knees happily to her chest. I found myself envious of the filter she was seeing through. To me this was a wasteland where small animals had to forage through the night to survive. Had I always been like this?

  “There’s our guide,” J.P. said as she pulled into a small parking lot connected to the dune field by a low wooden boardwalk.

  “Who needs a guide when we have Victoria?” Poco said.

  J.P. grunted. “You don’t want to get lost out there, trust me.”

  “Is that the voice of experience?” I said—with a sort of evil hope in my voice.

  She glared at me in the rearview mirror. “You’re kidding, right?” “J.P. doesn’t get lost,” Poco said.

  So we’d returned to our roles. I reeled in my next barb and busied myself getting the camera ready. Frances had said it was easier to make pictures in the evening here.

  Camera on its strap around my neck, I followed the trio down the walk and got ready for another commentary on gypsum and alkali flats and buried trees. But our guide was remarkably quiet as we followed him down the boardwalk, which, I saw, extended far from the road and into the dunes.

  “See the lizard tracks?” Victoria whispered to me.

  I looked where she was pointing. Tiny feet had left their imprint on ripples in the sand that must have looked like foothills to their owners. As we
walked, the miniature footprints disappeared under a soft blowing of sand that began to take on a reddish-pink hue as the daylight faded. The shadows lengthened, and the surface patterns pronounced themselves more clearly.

  Frances was right. While in the stark sunlight, the white dunes came out gray if I didn’t overexpose the photo by one or two stops, but now I could use the internal meter and capture their true colors—apricot and salmon and the skin of a peach.

  I stopped and shot a slice of dunes and the silhouette of a yucca’s tassels against a suddenly fiery sky. Camera raised, I shot the sun dipping below the distant San Andres Mountains. When it finally disappeared, I could almost hear it hiss in the stillness that fell with it, leaving the desert bathed in a light full of mystery as the sands glowed against the dark horizon. This I couldn’t photograph.

  “Ryan,” Poco whispered. “Turn around.”

  I did, and gasped. As the sun had made its flashy descent in the west, the moon had risen silently and without fanfare in the east. Round and full as a ripe, silver fruit, it hung in the darkened sky. A whole minute passed before I could raise the camera again. It almost seemed a sacrilege to make a picture.

  But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. I took shot after shot, experimenting with a filter, focusing on the silhouettes of the women with the moon as their backlight, capturing the lone star that winked shyly near the lunar splendor. I might have stayed half the night if Poco hadn’t tugged gently at my sleeve.

  “We’re leaving,” she whispered.

  “Okay,” I whispered back.

  Everyone spoke in hushed tones. The stillness demanded it. There was not a sound beyond the muted padding of our feet on the boards. Nothing arose to stop the thoughts or steer them away from themselves. J.P. was at least right about that. It was easy to get lost in them.

  I found it terrifying.

  By the time we reached the car, my palms were so sweaty I could barely hold the camera. I was actually grateful when J.P. unlocked the car and set off the alarm that made the horn blast repeatedly, splintering the silence. I was so grateful, in fact, that I didn’t even gloat when other parties shot killing looks at her until she managed to turn it off.

  “That definitely ruined the moment, didn’t it?” she said.

  I stared at the back of her head. Was that self-deprecation I heard?

  “Okay, onward,” she said. “We go around two curves and there’s the entrance to the walk into the campsite.” She turned to back the car up and looked sternly at Victoria and me. “You did bring your flashlights, didn’t you?”

  “The moonlight should be enough,” I said.

  “You did forget.”

  “Didn’t you bring extras?” I said sweetly.

  She scowled.

  “Just checking,” I said. “I brought mine.”

  When we got to the check-in point, two guys with everything they owned in fanny packs were just finishing up at the registration book. They threw laughing glances over their shoulders as they hurried off down the path. I guess I’d have laughed, too, if I’d run into four suburban housewives loaded up like beasts of burden. I’d seen pack mules in Bolivia with less stuff on their backs than we had.

  “You are not serious,” J.P. said at the sign-in book.

  Poco edged over to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “They took the last campsite!”

  “Didn’t you make a reservation?” I said.

  “I told you, they don’t take reservations. But nobody ever camps out here at this time of year.”

  Victoria blinked at the path. “They do.”

  “Yes, those guys and four other parties. Probably all together for some kind of beer fest.”

  Her efforts at blaming somebody else for what was no one’s fault were failing her. I watched her shoulders slump.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” she said.

  “You couldn’t have known,” Poco said.

  J.P. stared at her, as if not knowing was a notion she’d never entertained. I looked at the four of us, all roughed-out with no place to go, and incorrigible laughter burst from my gut.

  “I don’t see what’s funny,” J.P. said.

  “Well, look at us. Hillary didn’t take this much when he climbed Mt. Everest. We could live in the wilderness for weeks, but there’s no room in it for us.”

  Poco covered her mouth, but I knew there was a giggle lurking there. I couldn’t tell what was going on with Victoria. Her hair was hanging in front of her face.

  “So now what?” I said, looking at J.P.

  “We go home. I don’t see what else we can do.”

  She stomped off, swaying slightly under the pack, and I felt a little bad.

  “She was looking forward to this, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “It’s okay,” Poco told me.

  Though it obviously wasn’t. J.P. drove all the way out to Highway 70 in a brutal silence that put White Sands to shame, ignoring Poco’s suggestion that we at least go to dinner—or coffee and dessert maybe? Chocolate was known to make anything better, she said. J.P. didn’t even grunt.

  Until we stopped to turn onto the highway, and saw the roadblock. Then she exploded.

  “Now what?”

  “It looks like the road’s closed,” Poco said.

  “I can see that. What’s the deal?”

  “I bet it’s a missile range test,” Victoria said.

  “In the middle of the night? That’s ridiculous, if you ask me!”

  “Maybe that’s why they didn’t,” I said.

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Ask you.”

  J.P. twisted halfway around, but Poco put her hand on her shoulder. “You know what, let’s just go toward Alamogordo and see if we can find something to eat. I’m starving.”

  “We didn’t have dinner,” Victoria said.

  “Of course we didn’t have dinner! We were going to cook wein-ers over a campfire and eat under the stars.”

  I was startled by the disappointment that showed through the thin place in J.P.’s anger. I felt small and mean again.

  “Just turn left, okay?” Poco said. “We’ll find something.”

  We found nothing, because in two miles the highway was blocked in that direction as well. At least on this end there was a marked car with its light flashing and someone military-looking at the wheel. When J.P. pulled over behind him, he got out and came to the driver’s side window.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  J.P. filled him in on our plight in a voice meant to change the entire schedule of the White Sands Missile Range. The man was unmoved.

  “It’s going to be two, three o’clock in the morning before the road opens again in either direction. You can go on past me, but you won’t be able to come back through until then.”

  “I see,” J.P. said. “It would be nice if you would inform the public about these things.”

  “We do, ma’am. Watch the news. Check it online. Read the papers.”

  “Thank you,” J.P said, increasing the starch in her voice. “We’ll move on now.”

  I wanted to sit back, arms folded, and enjoy her misery, but she was already stewing in her own embarrassed juices.

  “I guess we have no choice,” she said as we pulled back onto the road.

  We rode in silence again for a few miles, until Victoria said, “There’s a motel.”

  “Where?”

  “On the right.”

  J.P. swung across the road and stopped with a spray of gravel in front of a strip of doors with a room labeled Office on the end.

  My laughter bubbled up again. “This is where you come for a two-hour tryst.”

  J.P. looked at me in the rearview. “Is that the voice of experience?” “J.P.!” Poco said.

  She shoved the gearshift into reverse. “Okay, so I guess we’ll go into Alamogordo. I think they have, like, one hotel—it’s a Holiday Inn.”

  Poco pulled out her phone. “I’ll call first.”

  We waited while s
he got the number and chatted sweetly with someone—who told her they had no rooms available and to try the Motel 6. That, too, was full for the night.

  “What is going on that we don’t know about?” J.P. looked at me in the rearview again. “Was there something in the paper about some big event?”

  “The Whole Enchilada Festival,” I said, “but that’s in Las Cruces.”

  “There are never enough rooms in Las Cruces for those things. The overflow comes out here.”

  “And I would know that how? I just moved here.”

  Poco put up her hand. “Okay, listen. This place doesn’t look that bad. Why don’t we see if they have a couple of rooms?”

  “It looks like you could get a disease in there,” Victoria whimpered.

  “A disease?” I said. “We were going to sleep on the ground in the desert with the snakes and the kangaroo rats. How could this be worse?”

  The whimper turned to a squeal.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Victoria,” J.P. said. “You’re not doing to die. Let’s just go in and make the best of it.”

  “We’ll order room service,” Poco said and giggled.

  We all went in, walking as if we were attached with Velcro, and learned from a semi-toothless individual of undetermined gender that there was only one room left, with a double bed. We took it.

  “I bet there’ll be another room available at about ten,” J.P. said as we lugged all our stuff from the car to the door.

  I was surprised by her sudden willingness to adapt. Victoria, on the other hand, was winding up like a manic toy soldier.

  “I don’t think I can sleep in there,” she said before we even unlocked the door.

  J.P. went in first and turned to us with a mock-cheerful face. “Well, it ain’t the Ritz-Carlton.”

  I slipped in behind her and surveyed the dark-green walls, which matched the bedspread and the flattened carpet and the Formica on the dresser. The only thing that wasn’t the color of cooked spinach was the overhead fixture, because there wasn’t one. A bare bulb illuminated the room in light that made us all look like we were headed for our coffins.