Walking Dunes

by Sandra Scofield

  He could see that the girl was headed for the highway. She trudged along like someone on her way to do a despised chore. He took the beer and carried it around to the back of the station wagon and put it under a pile of jeans jackets, then gunned the motor and spun out of the sand.

  The cop was sitting in the same place, hiding behind his mirrored sunglasses. He hardly looked up as David pulled fast across the road and up beside him. “Man, you aren’t going to believe this,” David told him. He leaned out of his window a little, his arm dangling along the hot chrome.

  The cop grinned. “Who died, son?”

  David grinned back. He knew he had the punchline. “Would you believe a rabbit?” he said.

  3.

  David Puckett had lived much of that summer of 1958 in an old beauty parlor in Fort Stockton. His father had rented the building as a store for the third year in a row, but this time he hired his son to spend half of each summer month there alone, doing business with the local people, both Anglo and Mexican. David sold yard goods (mill ends and damaged fabrics), clothing (discontinued or imperfect), and some Army surplus goods. Four or five days a month he traveled to outlying towns like Iraan and Rankin, sleeping at night in the station wagon and setting up sale tables wherever he could. He liked being out from under his father’s eye. He liked feeling he was on his own. And he told himself, as his father had told him, that he was doing a service to these communities, selling cheap goods nobody else wanted to people who needed them, for bargain prices they could barely afford.

  The beauty parlor still had its name painted on the stucco above the outside door: Pearl’s Curls. Pearl had moved her business into her own house’s parlor, as his Aunt Cheryl had done in her Monahans home. Inside and out, the old building was a faded salmon color. All the chairs had been removed, but there were mirrors and counters along two walls, and two deep, black ceramic sinks at the rear of the store. He rented tables from a church. He slept on a cot beneath the mirror. He ate from cans, or went to the Brite Spot Cafe two blocks up the street. Sometimes he walked at dusk out on the edge of town where it was so hot and dry and barren, it might have been some farflung planet. At night he listened to country music on his little radio, and read. He had begun keeping a notebook, too.

  He had been listing the events of his life. It was merely a way to combat boredom. He had thought of the list as an inventory, and he had been amazed at the ways he could vary it. It gave him an odd sense of power to realize that what he left off and what he put on the list changed the quality of his history. Did he say, for 1947, “Dad left us.”? Or did he say, “Dad went back to New York to work.”? Did he record his grandmother’s death, in the house she had been helping pay for? And what did he make of his many childhood illnesses—the mumps and measles, croup and chicken pox? What of his asthma attacks, which his father dismissed as phantom, his father being an expert after a lifetime of “real” asthma that had kept him out of the war. David saw that the details of his life were petty, but he sensed that if he amassed those details, they would add up to something, that their density would amount to a life. He was fascinated with the way stories and novels were built of particulars, how small details lingered in his mind for a long time after a book was put away. He would never forget, for example, the moment when Hardy’s Tess, having changed into shoes to go into Clare’s house, hears Clare and his buddy laughing at her poor, ugly, hateful boots. And when he read The Great Gatsby months before his first visit to the Basin Country Club, he found himself dreaming of girls in dresses cut low on their breasts, of chandeliers, deep carpets, food arranged on platters like the petals of flowers. When he read “Winter Dreams,” he heard himself saying, “yes, yes,” even though the story was set in a part of the country far away, with white winters and summers of lakes. He understood Fitzgerald’s special talent at conveying longing, because it evoked his own yearnings, so that his own pain—what did he want so much, except, like Dexter Green, the possession of beauty in all its forms?—was as real and acute as if someone had been sticking pins in his chest. The more he played with memory, and with recording his own life, however sketchily, the more he burned to go on with it. He wanted to get to the good part, which he associated with independence, and which encompassed all those things for which he longed. He felt impatient, because he was sick of being a boy, and he did not know how to set his life in motion. Then he reminded himself that this year, his last in high school, was for that very thing, for commencement.

  His father’s name was Saul Stolboff, and David regarded him as a good subject for character study, for he was an odd man in Basin, Texas. Any good explanation of the man would be complex. But as David pondered what he knew of his father, he realized how little it was. He did not know enough to build stories; he did not understand enough to explain anything, but things he had always taken for granted began to take on new resonance. There was, for example, the matter of their names. David’s name was Stolboff, too, of course; David had seen it on his birth certificate. He had gone through a phase when he was convinced he was illegitimate, and his mother had produced proof that he was not. There was a sister, too, fifteen months younger. Saul had abandoned them when the children were five and seven. He returned to New York, where he had grown up. He had met David’s mother when she was a nurse in a hospital on Long Island. Marge had intended to nurse for the Army when the country entered the war. (Such audacity! David thought, wondering how she had found the courage to leave her family.) Of course by the time the Army wanted her, there was her unlikely marriage, then there was David. After the war they had gone to Texas. The thought of that fascinated David. Maybe, when they stepped off the train, the sight of that vast featureless landscape had triggered in Saul ancestral memories of Russian wheat fields, but such ideas had been erased by drought and hardship, by the Protestant culture and his wife’s family. Saul had truly gone abroad. He had not lasted two years before he fled, going back to work for his brother, who owned a pants factory in Queens. In a while David’s mother changed their names to Puckett, her family’s name. When Saul returned in time for David’s thirteenth birthday, mumbling about Bar Mitzvahs but doing nothing, the names stayed changed, a constant reminder of who the parent-on-the-front had turned out to be, a constant reproof of the man who had run away. Only recently had David wondered how it made his father feel, to have a son who did not use his name.

  David tried to imagine his father’s life, but he had little to go on. If David asked questions, Saul said, “You don’t need to know,” or “What’s it to you?” Once, drunk, he said, “So much to know, all the way back to Russia, and it dribbles out with you like an old man’s piss.” There was a vast chasm between father and son, and David did not know how to bridge it. He was a child of the plains, his father a city boy. He tried to learn about city life. He read Studs Lonigan twice, but it was another city, after all, another kind of family. His immigrant grandparents were dead, his mother’s parents were dead. The family floated on a sea of estrangement. At least Marge had her sister, and her daughter, though Joyce Ellen was out of the house now. His father belonged to another world entirely, and he had left it for his family of Pucketts.

  It was not difficult to imagine his parents falling in love. David had a strong romantic streak; he understood that attraction can feel like fate. There was a photograph of his parents on his mother’s bureau. His mother had been a handsome young woman, with her long rolled hair, her marble green eyes. His father would have been so different from the boys she had known in Texas. Now David’s parents’ first feelings had drowned in disappointment and anger. David would realize that days had gone by and his parents had not spoken in his presence. He would wonder, what did it this time? Sometimes they shouted, and David would not know why. Often it was money. Marge didn’t see much of whatever Saul earned as an alterations tailor; there were hints that he gambled, though David imagined only penny-ante stuff with his barber and the junkman. For Marge, there were debts from her mother’s illness, and the
house always needed something. Then too, Saul’s messy habits drove her wild, though she was sloppy at home, herself. David’s sister, Joyce Ellen, was always good for a row, too. Saul struck her a couple of times after he came back: she was lazy, provocative. Marge told him flat out that if he ever did it again she would throw him out; it was her house. After that Saul used his better weapon, sarcasm, but Joyce Ellen could rouse him to a shout. The night she ran off with her boyfriend, there had been slammed doors, some broken dishes. Marge said she would never forgive him. It seemed she had never forgiven him. Once David heard her scream, “I could have gone to the war!” Yet, surely, there had once been something larger between Marge and Saul, and the disintegration of that something would account for a great bitterness. But David saw his parents sliding toward the stagnancy of indifference. He thought: One day my father will go away a second time, and I will never see him again.

  How he envied the lives of ordinary families! He had dated a nice, pretty girl for a while the year before. Sarah Jane Cottle. She had a clean bright beauty, plump chipmunk cheeks, a quiet air of courtesy and shyness. She lived in a white frame house that had curtains and rugs and an elm tree in the yard. Her mother sewed skirts and blouses for her. Her father was the owner of a restaurant supply company. He showed David his freezer in the utility room, stocked with New York strips, fat prawns, quartered chickens, for the family. Once when David was at their house for dinner, Mr. Cottle told his wife, “This is an excellent pot roast, dear.” David simply could not bear it; why did it seem so easy for them? How were they different from his family? What is wrong with us? He had quit dating the girl.

  Little by little David realized that all the questions you had about your life could serve as a kind of inspiration, a springboard to whatever fiction you preferred. Of course David did not know how to construct stories yet. A story had to have a shape. His favorite teacher, last year’s old Miss Bodkins, said great stories were about moments in people’s lives when they saw everything clearly, if only for an instant, and so everything changed. Real life, for a boy, was a tedious unraveling, the rolling out of a ball of string. If David could have such a moment of apprehension as Miss Bodkins described, if he could see, if only for a moment, where he was headed, how his young life had meaning, he felt he could seize it—the meaning, the life. Miss Bodkins suggested books for him to read. She smiled when he said how he loved the passion of A. J. Cronin and Erich Maria Remarque, the largeness of their visions. She said all the great questions had been explored, the great characters had been written, that life now was smaller, and his generation would have to learn to write new stories. She said the atomic bomb had made them all insignificant. She said most people would pass their lives without a moment’s serious reflection, but David could be a writer if he wanted. He had language, ambition, and something she called his “fine sensibility.” Still, he did not ask Miss Bodkins how to make stories out of his family’s life. He would have been humiliated to discuss it. Miss Bodkins urged him to write stories about teen-agers. She said there was a lot of drama in kids’ lives. “I’ve learned that if I’ve learned anything, teaching all these years. Teen-agers live on the edge of a knife.” Miss Bodkins found him in the library during her free period, and had these talks with him. She sat across from him at a table with her hands flat on the surface in front of her. The skin around her knuckles was loose and he wanted to tug at it, to see it come away from the frail mass of her hand. She spoke matter-of-factly, even when she said dramatic things. “You wonder why they do it,” she said, pointing at the newspaper, where it told that someone had committed a terrible crime. She was an old maid, with tight pin-curled hair. She wore the same two suits over and over again. He wondered what she would write about if she tried. He thought she probably had tried, and failed, and so she would spend forty years teaching dolts the difference between assonance and alliteration, and the meaning of Ozymandias.

  In Fort Stockton, David got the idea for his first real story. There was a girl there. A woman, Teresa. She was twenty years old. Her parents had been killed when their car was struck by a freight train the winter before, while she was a student at the college in Alpine. She had come to stay with her mother’s parents until she felt like going on. They owned the pharmacy, the laundry, and the beauty parlor.

  David had met Teresa in late June, when he took his laundry in one day. Shorts, socks, shirts.

  “Sibilant laundry,” she said when he came back to pick them up. She was pretty, with straight dark hair pulled back in a plain pony tail, dark eyes, a slim body—a type he admired. But she was older, and he thought she probably saw him as a kid.

  He laughed and said, “Now clean, thank you very much.” He felt wonderfully sophisticated with his repartee, but when he saw her again, he felt oafish. He was afraid they had exhausted their wit with one another.

  A few weeks later she came to the shop while he was folding shirts. She pushed some cloth back on one of the tables and hopped up to sit there. “My grandfather says your father is Jewish,” she said.

  “My father is a Jew.”

  “I think I’d like being Jewish, feeling that I go back so far.”

  “Everybody does that. Goes back. Everybody comes from somewhere.”

  She peered at him. “I thought you could tell me what it’s like.”

  “What are you asking?”

  “Being Jewish! Doesn’t it make you different?”

  “I don’t think about it.” This was not altogether true. “I don’t think of it as the reason I feel different.”

  “You do feel different, though?” she persisted.

  “Maybe, in some ways. But from what? Different from rich kids? Hah, that’s obvious. Different from dumb ones? Let’s hope so. I’m not weird. I have friends. I play tennis, I’m on student council.” He felt a flush of hostility toward her. He hardly thought of himself as a curiosity! The only thing strange about him was that he read so much. He didn’t know other kids who did. His tennis partner Ellis read auto and sports magazines, his buddy Leland read science fiction and the newspaper. Glee read girls’ magazines. Saul read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, the same books over and over. He kept them in the bedroom. Of course he wasn’t a kid.

  “The only thing different about me is I’m alone,” Teresa said. “I suppose I should be glad I’m grown, and there’s a little money for me.”

  “You should be glad, if there’s money!” he said quickly, then blushed deeply when he realized it would have come from her dead parents. “Were you away when it happened?” He knew it was a terrible question. There was no right thing to say. He had this crazy thought: I’ve never said anything serious to a girl.

  She stared at him a moment. “I might get married. A rancher’s son I know in Alpine. My grandparents think I should. They think I’d cheer up if I had a baby. What do you think?”

  He sat down on the cot across from her. From her perch on the table, she looked down on him, grasping the table edge and swinging her legs. She wore a long Crayola-green cotton skirt. He said, “People should marry if they’re in love and they want to.” He felt silly. She was making fun of him.

  “Do you have a girlfriend? You look like you would.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’m not in love with her. I like her.”

  “You don’t date other girls?”

  “Not right now. I could, if I wanted to.”

  “Do you sleep with her?”

  He shifted on the cot and stared at the floor between his feet. What the hell, he thought; he would never see her again after this summer. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. When he lifted his head, she was going out the door.

  That was when he had the idea for a story. That was when he really started his notebook.

  Three or four buddies are on their way somewhere (where?), and they’re coming to a train crossing. The kid driving is always the careful one. It’s a joke with his buddies. He studies for tests, he begins as
signments the same night he gets them. The other boys razz him. In an instant, he decides to show them, he decides to play chicken with the train. They are all killed.

  Teresa’s parents’ car stalled. Couldn’t they have gotten out and run? Did they sit there while her father tried to turn the key? Did they think the train would stop in time?

  Were they completely stupid?

  He went for weeks without seeing Teresa. He passed her on the street. Her eyes were red, her face drawn. She didn’t seem to see him. Well, why wouldn’t she cry? She had lost her parents.

  He lay on his cot at night and dreamed of making love to her. His father had once warned him: Never fuck a crying woman, it will obligate you, but his father could not have foreseen this.

  He thought of her with her blouse open. Her bra would be very clean and white. He would be scared. He would whisper, Why? and she would answer, I’m so sad. Then, gently, he would push her down on the cot. He would kneel and touch her reverently; she had lost her parents. Making love with her would ennoble him, draw him into her grief. It would be wonderful.

  He kept thinking about the boys in the pickup, the train wreck. Each of them would have a story. One of the boys just found out his girlfriend is pregnant. He loves her. He doesn’t really realize it until that last instant, that tiny part of a second when he knows he can’t ever tell her. If he had lived, he would have married her.

  He wondered: The girl who was pregnant, when her boyfriend is killed, would she kill herself? Or would she defy her family, keep her baby, remember him always? He didn’t think many girls had that kind of grit. They buckled under. Of course his own sister had eloped, hadn’t she? With Big Pete Kelton.

  He kept thinking about the pregnant girl. He thought about her when he drove away from the cop and the girl with the rabbit. He thought about her later that night in the beauty parlor. But when he sat down with his notebook, intending to write about her, he wrote instead: