Into the Valley

by Ruth Galm

  Without thinking, she reached in her purse for one of the counterfeit checks she’d not yet dared touch. And like the detonating of a bomb the thoughts stopped.

  She left her desk with the typewriter still humming. The bank a block away the oldest in the West, a plaque certified, and the brass fixtures shone and the glass panes lined up perfectly across the marble. There was nothing to focus on but the gleam and the panes and the softness of the teller’s hair, and there was no going back.

  Out of her palm fell the crushed poppies. A train whistle blew in the near distance. She left the railroad tracks and walked back to the Mustang and understood exactly where to go next.

  29.

  An ocherous afternoon light fell on the subdivision. B. drove past the gate, the colored flags flat in the dead air. The stucco houses looked blanched in the heat, which seemed to radiate up from the ground and in from fields and to bend the new trees along the street to nowhere. She parked the car and walked into the cul-de-sac. Her brain continuing to press against her skull. A toddler on a tricycle in a faded bathing suit stared blankly at her.

  B. passed the unfinished houses with giant still-empty rooms and followed the walkway of the first occupied unit. She glanced around. The toddler continued to stare. B. flipped quickly through the letters, slipping anything official-looking into the ostrich-skin purse. She did this at three more houses. As she walked back to her car, the throbbing and swirling and heat and caffeine came together in a steady blaring in her mind.

  A man came out of one of the houses. “Are you looking for Patty? Because she’s sick today.” B. walked on without answering, past the little girl, fumbling with the car keys. The man followed her.

  “I can have her call you! She’ll hate to have missed—”

  B. slammed the door of the Mustang and peeled out.

  In a motel room with the drapes closed she opened the envelopes. She did not look at the amounts, just wrote down names and account numbers on a torn-out page of the phone book.

  She dialed him. His face coalesced in her mind only in the vaguest form, black and pink dabs on a canvas.

  He did not pick up. She lay her head on the bedspread, the heavy receiver at her ear. She dialed again and again. In the clicks and the tumbling she felt the carsickness drumming her down into a dark echoing pit.

  When he finally answered, she said: “I’ll tell you the truth this time.”

  Her mind focused on the single guiding image of the banks. “It’s some trouble I got into back east. A loan I took out under the table.”

  There was silence on the line, the lighting of a cigarette. “Go on,” he said.

  She waited for the signal of the image in her mind. “It was an operation. I’ve never told anyone. I was pregnant, by one of the college boys. He proposed. But he hit me.” She told him she’d gotten a backroom abortion but something had gone wrong; she’d had terrible pains. When she finally went to her doctor, he advised a hysterectomy.

  It was a true story. She’d heard one of the secretaries tell it about a friend, except instead of having the operation the friend had hung herself by a belt in her closet.

  She thought for a moment she’d lost him.

  “So you couldn’t tell your mama and papa who sent you to the nice little college to marry a nice little college boy,” he said. But she heard in his voice the beginning of a desire to believe her.

  “No.”

  “You already lied to me once.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  She waited to hear cigarette paper crumpling, an exhale. She heard nothing.

  Finally, he spoke. “I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s not right something like that should happen to you.”

  “Will you help me then?”

  She felt his vulnerability beating through the line. “What’s in it for me?” he asked.

  “I’ll be your girl, Daughtry.”

  She considered briefly how she was deceiving him. But the dark sinking pulled her down and she knew there was only one thing she cared about.

  30.

  He was waiting for her in the lobby of a new Motel 6 off the freeway. As he walked through the glass doors she saw that he was unshaven, his thick black eyebrows unruly as if he had tossed and turned and left straight from bed. He told her to walk toward the Mustang with him and they sat in the front seats without looking at each other.

  “I have new account numbers,” B. blurted out.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I took them from a subdivision.”

  He put his forehead in his hands. “You kidding me? Are you asking to get caught? It’s not as big as you think out here. You have to let me take care of that.”

  “I wanted to be prepared. So it would go more quickly.”

  “How did you know I’d help you, huh? You think I’m a sucker?” She tried not to hear the plaintiveness in his voice.

  “Of course not,” she stalled. “I was just hoping. I was hoping you’d see me again. I wanted it to help us.”

  “Forget the damn account numbers.”

  A brown-skinned maid rolled her cart in front of the car. In a torturous slowness, she pulled out one at a time a roll of toilet paper, a set of sheets, soap. B. tried to wait but could not. “Do you have the new ones?”

  He kneaded the eyebrows. “I could leave right now. Sob story and all.”

  “Will it take very long, Daughtry?”

  “I could, you know. Get back in the car and drive all the damn way back and forget I ever met you.”

  “Please help me, Harold.”

  He turned toward the door and rubbed his knuckles across his cheek. He looked all of a sudden small and thin.

  “We’ll have them in a day,” he said coldly. “My buddy’ll deliver them here. He wants a cut.”

  “We could go meet him,” she said.

  He laughed angrily. “Ha! You ain’t the one making the deals.” He reached across her and opened the passenger door. “C’mon.”

  He led her to his own car in the parking lot. It was a battered coupe, the black interior faded to gray, a piece of ceiling hanging, gouges in the seats. It smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. She did not like leaving the Mustang, but she knew she must follow him. When she’d woken up that morning, her muscles had been taut with dizziness, her fingers clenched around the bedspread, numb.

  He drove out behind the motel, toward a collection of cottonwood trees in a vacant field. Their appearance in the middle of the empty lot gave them the aspect of a solemn gathering, a mournful tête-à-tête. “I saw this spot driving in,” he said. “We can relax a little, be normal for once. It’ll be good for you. You don’t look right.” From the trunk of the coupe he grabbed a bag of sandwiches and six-pack of beer and she noted with passing guilt that he had made a picnic for her.

  The creek under the cottonwoods was a bed of dry rocks. He laid out his black leather blazer for her to sit on and spread out the sandwiches. His oiled hair was a dark dome over his pale face, his features pale and tired and slicked with sweat from the heat. B. drank some of the beer but did not feel like touching the sandwich in the hot shade. She wanted to get the picnic over with, act through whatever Daughtry needed her to act through, get on to the checks. But Daughtry smoked a cigarette and drank his beer in sullen silence, as if mulling over a lost argument. The beer and the heat brought her back to her girlhood, her father with his bottle in the backyard after pruning and watering the roses (he loved to tend the rosebushes, never her mother). He spoke to B. in the simplest of terms—what she was playing, where she and her mother had bought her dress—and she did not know why she missed these stunted exchanges, why they seemed now reassuringly delineated.

  She knew she should try to tell Daughtry about missing the delineation, to offer some kind of truth. “I suppose when I was a girl,” she began hesitatingly, “I h
ad the same idea about growing up as everyone else. Marriage, children. Then in college I didn’t want to think about it. I only wanted to be on my own for a while, have my own apartment and job, nothing seemed so urgent . . . Then people started making less sense. They always asked me the same things. They started to feel very different from me, from what I thought about, and I began . . . to feel funny. I had this dizziness, you see, this nausea or wooziness or I don’t know how to describe it. So I tried to feel better from what’s supposed to make a girl feel better: meeting men, seeing pretty flowers, having my hair done. But none of it worked. And now the dizziness is there all the time. It never stops.” She gasped for air, it seemed. “Sometimes I don’t see how to live.”

  Daughtry took a long pull on his beer and then tossed the empty can toward the dry creek. “Tell you the truth, part of me wants to hit you. I’ve never hit a girl and I never will, but part of me wants to slap some sense into you so bad I could taste it.

  “You got no idea what it’s like, with your school and your books and your fanciness. It’s not like I don’t have dreams too, you know. I’m a custodian, for Chrissakes . . . I want to get a little fishing boat. My days off sometimes I go down near the wharves and throw in a line, take the catch back to Chinatown and sell ’em right outta the bucket. Gone in minutes, those Chinamen know their fish. But it makes me feel good. I got my own spot picked out and it don’t matter if it’s foggy and the tourists are shaking in their windbreakers, I’m out there and I don’t have to think about the damned union or time card or parole. Just the smell of the ocean and the fog mixed in the air, like a perfume . . . I can smell it here in this dry hole. Now if I had a boat, that’s all I’d do.

  “I’m sorry you’re dizzy,” he said. “But you’ve never had to worry about money in your life. I knew that the first day I saw you. You could do anything.”

  “Have you ever been on a boat, Daughtry?”

  He dug at the dry grass with his boot heel. “Naw. But I seen ’em doing it. I could do it if I had the chance.”

  He looked up into the cottonwoods. He seemed to be reading the flickering leaves for some go-ahead.

  “I thought about it the whole drive out here. What I think we should do. That would really set us up, fix us both. By the time we’re done we’ll have enough to get to Mexico, and I think we should get married down there.” He paused here but still did not look down from the trees. “You told me yourself the college guy hurt you, and so that kind of guy isn’t the answer for you. You need someone like me. You’re too soft for things, is what I’ve figured out. Too thin-skinned. I’m the kind of guy who can look out for you.” His voice gathered strength as he spoke. “So after this run, we won’t have to do anything else. I can get a boat down there and take care of us. You’re different and I’m different and maybe we fit together.”

  He paused and there was a hot breeze rustling the cottonwood leaves, then silence.

  “You can say right now if you don’t want to marry me and I’ll leave you alone.” He looked at her now. “I’ll leave you alone, but you’ll be on your own getting the money. That’s my offer to you.”

  She had watched his mouth moving, his tobacco-stained teeth and his pointed tongue flashing periodically over his dry lips. The words “marriage” and “Mexico” floated over her. She understood in them only her hands at the counters again, sliding the checks forward and collecting back the crisp bills, returning to the delineations, the cool expansive feeling. She would tell him whatever he needed to hear.

  “I can’t cook,” she answered finally.

  A crooked smile bloomed in his face. “I’ll handle it, baby. I’ll do the fishing and the cooking and you just stay pretty and get a tan.” He grabbed her and pressed her head into the damp of his chest, lips to her dirty hair. “It’ll be the best living. You’ll see.”

  She waited in the odor of his undershirt and their sweat for him to release her. The dappling of light through the cottonwoods made parts of them golden, his bicep, her white wrist, and in this light his proposal and her acceptance of it were remote and enchanted, a story she could listen to and admire.

  Back at the motel, he threw an envelope onto the bed. The blonde woman in the new driver’s license had not dissimilar features—an oval face, the aquiline nose. But the woman’s eyes were younger, fresh and open. B. memorized the freshness before putting the ID into the ostrich-skin purse, as if she could inhabit that too.

  Daughtry made love to her in the motel bed. He did not comment on her rankness, the rat’s nest French twist; it seemed to make him that much more devouring. She tried to lose herself in the sensations of skin on skin, the friction and release. But in reality she was walking across the linoleum, taking up the chained ballpoint pen, watching the clock above the vault. He fell asleep afterward, his hot thick body clamped over hers, but she went on, tracing the lines of the teller windows, running her fingers along the velvet ropes.

  31.

  In the morning, he made her shower and wash her hair. “We gotta get you dolled up the way I first saw you,” he said. She shrunk under the water as if the drops burned her skin. She made no move to lather or scrub. But Daughtry was waiting. She knew he would make her do it again. She forced herself to soap a washcloth and pass it over her body once, to pour out shampoo and rub it through her hair.

  Daughtry appraised her in the mirror as she applied her makeup. He got out the diamond brooch from her bag (she did not ask how he’d known it was there). She did not want to alarm him by telling him about the flyer. “I think that’s too formal for day, don’t you?” she said. He shrugged. The green poplin dress was laid out on the bed. “But I want to wear the ivory,” she said. “Baby, that’s a godawful mess, no offense. You look rundown in that.” He held out the green and when she did not immediately take it, he did not lower his arm. When she finally took it, she knew already it was wrong: the color too bright, the poplin too flimsy, the girlish belling of the skirt. Pulling her back somewhere she did not want to go. He brushed his fingers across her forehead and she forced herself not to flinch.

  “We’ll get you new dresses, baby. All brand new.”

  They went back to the lobby of the Motel 6 and a short wiry man with a blond goatee was waiting, wearing in the heat a buttoned-up dark denim jacket like Daughtry wore his leather blazer. Daughtry had B. stay outside on the hot asphalt where she shifted in the green dress, feeling conspicuous, watching the goateed man and Daughtry enact the mime of exchanging an envelope and shaking hands under the orbed hanging lamps of the lobby. The smell of hot tar from the parking lot sharpened the carsickness.

  They took the Mustang. Daughtry sat in the driver’s seat without asking.

  “Can I see the checks?” she asked.

  He laughed. “When we get there, doll. Just hold your horses.”

  She distracted herself by counting the rows of crops and fruit trees. But they went too quickly and the telephone poles too slowly and she could not block out Daughtry rambling on about the fishing “down South.” The only thing she could do to escape the growing of ill portent (not holding the checks, the green poplin dress) was to close her eyes and pretend to sleep. But she felt the dread still behind her eyelids. Before she knew it they were parked in front of a cinder-block building hedged by pruned oleanders, the sun glaring off its silver-coated doors. She had a moment’s hesitation that she’d already been to this bank. She decided she had not.

  “Can I see them now?” B. asked.

  “Sure, baby.” Daughtry handed over the vinyl book but watched her with it as if she were a small child handling a delicate ornament. She ran her fingers over the paper, studying the lines, the block address and cool blue pattern, the name to match the fake license.

  “You know what to do?” he asked.

  This struck her as funny and she laughed the first genuine laugh she could remember in months, until she saw his injured expression. She patte
d his hand and told him she knew and got out.

  The entire length of her rushed with blood. She felt as she walked toward the entrance that her skin needed only to be brushed up against for her to explode. But the bad signal came immediately in her reflection in the glass door. The light green and belling skirt. When she swung open the door the air inside was too cold. The ivory on the walls not soothing but dull, the line of teller windows a row of draining rectangles and the empty desks pointless.

  She made her way to the middle island. She jerkily filled out a withdrawal form; she crumpled it and started over. She absentmindedly put her hand to her heart but the diamond brooch was not there. In the corners of the ceiling she noticed the security cameras for the first time.

  The teller’s perfume had hints of gardenia, bringing the Brylcreemed boy and the graduation luncheon briefly into her head. She made her way past the stiff bow tie and the white linens in her mind, concentrating to speak each word.

  “I’d like to make this out to cash.”

  “You’re from the city,” the teller said (except it sounded like “thity” because of the girl’s lisp).

  “How did you know?” B. whispered.

  “It says so on your check.” Her lisp had disappeared. “And you don’t look like you’re from here,” the girl said without a shadow of malice. Then the lisp returned: “Now just a minute, Miss Lawthon, I’ll thee if we can accommodate this request.”

  The girl walked over to a manager at one of the empty desks. B. waited for her palms to dampen or her heart to race but no fear or anxiety was in her. Her body seemed to slacken, as if it were ready to be led away. But when the manager glanced over, his easy nod and smile showed that he had no qualms about her, the pretty patron with her clean dress and washed hair. The cool expansive feeling did come then. She thanked the teller and gathered the cash and walked out.