His mother and the man from the camper were out front by the pool—or what used to be the pool, until a few months back when she and he and Diego the cook at the cafe had filled it with a rusted swing set and the motel’s busted air conditioners and a bunch of rain gutters torn down by a storm.
The man from the camper looked like a cowboy. He wore a black hat and black boots and stood beside Annabelle at the shallow end of the pool. He was tall. He kept his head down, listening as Annabelle spoke. They stood just shy of the morning shadow of the big motel sign out by the highway. The stranger had the look of a man who had wandered in a desert with no horse, who had buried treasure in a graveyard somewhere dry and dusty, where crows sat on tombstones and skeletons hung in nooses from long and crooked tree branches. Like one of those movies, the boy thought, where everyone talks English through Italian lips.
It was no small thrill when the boy saw the long knife on the stranger’s hip.
“Should cover you a night or two,” Annabelle was saying. “Scrap metal you can pile by that dumpster yonder by the office. There’s a fella in town who’ll pay me for it. Straight up trash goes in the dumpster.”
“How do I know what’s trash and what ain’t?” the man asked.
“If it ain’t metal, it’s trash,” she said. “There’s a closet in back of the motel here, you need a broom or anything like that. It’s got a lock on the door but it’s busted.”
“Them pumps still work?” he asked of the old pump island, just beyond the office portico.
She shook her head.
“Whichaway’s that town?” he asked.
She pointed west. “Bout ten minutes.”
They both looked in that direction.
“You understand no drinking,” she said. “I got a little boy.”
The man nodded, glancing up at the sun where it climbed the bright October sky.
Annabelle followed his gaze and saw that the dark clouds to the west had already passed on.
Up on the hill, the station wagon’s horn blew. The boy sat in the window of the driver’s door and banged his hand on the roof. “We’re gone be late, Momma!”
Annabelle lifted a hand to show she’d heard. “My name’s Annabelle Gaskin,” she said to the man. “That’s Sandy. He’s ten.”
“Travis Stillwell,” the man said. He stepped away from her to the edge of the pool, making no offer of his hand. Instead he hunkered down in the shadow of the rusted metal sign that bore the motel’s name, the Sundowner Inn. The neon piping was dark.
Motel—Cafe—RV—Pool, the sign said. Your Home Away From Home.
To the man’s back, Annabelle said, “I’ll let you get to it then.” When he made no reply, she turned and went away, back to the house, where the boy had the wagon’s motor running and had dropped his mother’s purse unzipped on the seat. She opened the driver’s door and was about to get in when she thought to look back down the hill. She saw the man take hold of a rusted mattress spring from where he crouched. He gave it a tug, but it did not budge. He let it go.
“Who is he, Momma?” Sandy leaned out the driver’s window and rested his elbows on the sill. The morning wind tugged at the tongue of his tie.
Annabelle reached behind her head and slipped her hair out of the knot. It fell around her shoulders and was pulled every which way by the wind. “Just some man, can’t afford his hookup.”
“How come you got him cleaning out the pool? We gone fill it back up?”
Annabelle did not answer.
“How come he put that knife on to clean the pool?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She pushed her hair away from her face, which was solemn and pretty and not unlined by the life she had made here in the desert. “Men just wear knives sometimes.”
Travis went back to the camper after he saw the woman and the boy pull away in the station wagon. He went inside and closed the door and stood near the sink, staring up at the sheet he had thrown over the twine to hide the bunk. He took off his denim coat, bare-chested beneath it, and tossed it over the dinette seat. The air in the camper was metallic and mote-thick. The morning sunlight was an arrow lodged in the socket of his right eye. His throat was parched. He was hot. His thigh was burning, his leg going stiff. And, despite the lingering taste of pennies in his mouth and the rolling nausea in his gut, he was suddenly very, very hungry.
He went to the table, where he kept a jar of peanut butter and a package of saltine crackers. He opened the crackers and dipped one in the peanut butter. The cracker broke off in the butter, so he dug it out and popped the crumbs into his mouth and chewed and licked—
hungry, so hungry
—his fingers clean.
He took another cracker and jammed it into the jar—
hunger, this hunger, big as the desert, big as the sky
—and ate it. He chewed, swallowed. Dropped the crackers on the floor and put his fingers straight into the peanut butter and scooped out a glob, shoved this into his mouth.
It was not a thing with edges, this hunger.
He chewed and swallowed.
It was not a shape to be filled.
A strand of brown saliva dripped from his chin.
He looked up and saw his own bloody handprint—
red tongue lapping at a sliced breast
—on the dinette cushion.
A monstrous cramp seized his guts.
The jar of peanut butter hit the linoleum.
Travis sagged against the table, sank down to the floor and curled onto his side, where he vomited. He rolled over and lay still, and soon the cramps had passed, though he lay shivering on the floor for a space of time he could not put a number to.
What is happening to me? he kept thinking, over and over.
God-and-Christ, what?
Behind where Travis lay, his sleeping berth was situated above a cabinet as long and wide as the berth itself. A pressboard panel door with laminate wood grain and a plastic knob hung crookedly at floor level. Now, something thumped inside the cabinet, and the door creaked open.
Flecked with his own spit-up, Travis rolled over and put his weight on his right elbow and stared at the open door.
It came again, a soft thump.
A wrench settling in the toolbox, maybe.
Or, he thought, this hunger, wanting out.
He closed his eyes.
The woman’s voice he had heard, fleeting that morning, came again into his head, like a whisper of silk over flesh: What do you see, Travis, when you’re alone in the dark? What waits for you in the closets of your empty, rotting rooms? Those places you cannot remember, those dreams you want to forget . . .
Now, eyes still shut, he saw a cage of steel bars, something big and terrible in the total black of its farthest corner. Something—
momentous
—monstrous. He could hear it breathing, a deep low rumble, and he knew that if he opened his eyes he would see it, there, inside the cabinet. It would crawl out into the light.
I will not look, he thought.
But you will see, the woman’s voice said. You will see, and you will like what you see. T-R-A-V-I-S.
He kicked the pressboard door shut.
After that, he got up and stripped the sheets from his mattress and wrapped them in the quilt. He cleaned the blood from the berth walls and ceiling with water and dirty dishrags, in the way that he had cleaned his hands when the woman had come a-knocking, with liquid soap and water from the cache of jugs beneath his sink. The dishrags, along with the quilt and the sheets and the paper towels he had used to wipe up his vomit, he stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag and tied with a twist-tie. The bag he threw into the motel dumpster.
Later, wearing a clean white T-shirt and jeans and hat, he stood in the shade of the brick portico outside the motel office, where the pair of defunct Mobil gas pumps were cracked and rusting on their island. He leaned in the shade and watched the sun mount the sky. He looked out at the pool, which was choked with tumbleweeds a
nd the wreckage of someone’s life. Some spaces must be un-filled, he thought. Unpacked, like memories. And, if necessary, thrown away.
Down the boardwalk, where the six motel cabins began, the orange cat with no tail had slunk out from somewhere and sat watching him, its eyes narrowed.
“Hey, cat,” Travis said.
The cat looked away.
Pulling his hat low on his head, ignoring the pain in his thigh, the ache in his head, the tremor in his gut, thinking that what he really needed was time, time to unpack the last twenty-four hours and sort it all out, thinking that maybe this place could give him that, Travis limped out of the shade of the portico and set to work in the shallow end of the pool.
Ten miles away, in the sanctuary of the Little House of God, Sandy Gaskin stood between Diego the cook and his wife, Rosendo. Sandy held the hymnal and tried to follow the verses with his finger, but the lyrics were in Spanish and his Spanish was slow so he mouthed the words as best he could, hearing the old hymn’s chorus in English in his head. He looked up at Rosendo and saw that she was singing without benefit of the hymnal, her brown eyes fixed on the stained-glass window at the head of the church above the baptistery, where the glass made a colored picture of Jesus walking beside a lamb. Rosendo touched her swollen belly. It was their first child, and Sandy knew that Rosendo would have to quit the cafe soon to take care of the baby and he wondered if she would ever return.
Diego saw Sandy watching Rosendo and winked at him.
Sandy tugged at his shirt collar.
When the song ended, the congregation sat, their bodies moving all together like the rustle of wings. A curtain was opened behind the pulpit, beneath the stained glass, and there in the shallow pool of water stood Sandy’s mother in a white robe beside the old minister. Sandy could hear the faint trickle of the baptistery and could see the sun shining through the window above it. The light struck the surface of the water, and the water cast a colored reflection back onto his mother’s face.
“Brothers and sisters,” the minister said, “today, we celebrate new life in our savior as we welcome our sister, Annabelle, into the healing font of Christ’s blood. For it is by the blood that we are cleansed.”
The old man held Annabelle’s hand and smiled and intoned, “Annabelle Gaskin, debido a su profesión personal de fé en nuestro Señor Jesucristo, está bautizada en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo.” And with the gentle grace of a dancer, the old minister dipped Sandy’s mother into the water, and she rose wet and dripping and new.
Metal folding tables and Styrofoam coolers were set out under the shade of a post oak grove in back of the church. Annabelle’s hair was damp as she and Diego and Rosendo and the women of the church served frijoles and pork in green sauce out of hot foil pans to the congregation. The people filed past, paper plates in hand, offering a litany of warm wishes. Annabelle returned their smiles and thanked each of them for their kindness, hands trembling as she ladled food onto their plates. Every now and then she had to push a strand of wet hair out of her face. She kept a watch on the boy, who sat alone in the cemetery behind the church, where the clawing grass gave way to yucca and red mesquite. The boy sat at his father’s grave and watched a cluster of older boys kicking a soccer ball a ways out.
She took her son a plate and sat down beside him. The boy’s chin was in his hand, and with his other hand he was plucking the brown grass and holding it up and letting it blow away from between his fingers. Annabelle put a finger in her right ear and wiggled it. It made a wet sound. She waited on the boy to smile, but he did not.
Sandy cradled the paper plate of beans and pork in his lap. “How come you never sing in church?” he asked.
“Because I don’t like to sing.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like the way I sound when I do.”
“What’s wrong with the way you sound?”
“It sounds like I don’t believe the things I’m singing, so I’d rather not sing.”
“Is it true what the song says?” the boy asked.
“What song?”
“The one they sang before you were baptized. How we’ll all be together in heaven one day by a river.”
She thought about her answer. “I hope so,” she said.
The boys playing out in the field yelped and laughed, and Sandy said, “Sometimes I can picture it in my head, but when I’m here at the grave and I think about his body right beneath us, in that box, I can’t. I can’t see it no matter how hard I try. It’s easier at home or at school. Or in church when you’re singing and everyone else is singing around you. You close your eyes and there it is. But here, with his name in the stone like that, it’s more like a story you’d tell to make a baby go to sleep.”
Annabelle looked from her son to her husband’s tombstone, the name Tom Gaskin carved in the granite. Irrefutable. She looked out past the older boys kicking their ball, past the low hills littered with burned scrub, and suddenly she felt the day’s warmth and hope and her own immortal salvation work its way right out of her, like the last light of the day fleeing from the night. Washed clean, she thought, and felt the hot tears welling in her eyes.
She pulled her son close, kissed the top of his head. “Maybe I can’t always picture it like that either,” she said, “but today’s special, and today I see your daddy standing on the bank of that river, just like the song says. And he’s waiting for us. He’s picked a nice spot for us all to go and sit and have a picnic. Just the three of us. He’s smiling. And you know—”
She closed her eyes against the tears, and in that brief darkness, she saw the river of which she spoke, and the river was not clear. It was not shining with the crystal light of the sun, nor was her husband anywhere to be spotted along its wasted banks. The river was, in fact, a slow-moving ribbon of blood, and what she could not tell the minister or Diego or Rosendo or even her son was how she had never truly believed any such river could save her. Today, she had let herself be bathed in a promise to give her son the hope she lacked, hope for a place beyond this thin life where the boy would see his father again and sickness did not separate sons from fathers or wives from husbands. But in truth, she thought this all to be a cruel lie, and she knew this river could easily drown her and damn her if she let herself be swept along in its currents.
Washed clean.
“You know what he says?” Annabelle finished.
“What’s he say, Momma?”
She wiped her cheeks and smiled. “He says, what took you two so long?”
By mid-afternoon when Annabelle and Sandy got home from church, Stillwell had emptied half the pool and filled the dumpster. There were two piles of scrap metal heaped at the edge of the parking lot where the dirt became the grass. Annabelle turned the station wagon into the long drive, and as the car rocked over the ruts up to the farmhouse, she saw the man take his T-shirt from over the chain-link fence and slip it back on over sun-pinked skin. His muscles, she thought, are like a boy’s.
“Change out of those church clothes before you play,” she said to Sandy as they got out of the car. “And don’t bother that man. You hear me?”
Wearing an old pair of jeans and a faded blue T-shirt, Sandy went to the shed behind the farmhouse. He took a celery stick from his pocket and broke it in half and fed each rabbit through the hatches. He took both rabbits out and sat on the cool dirt floor and let them hop around and told them a story about a Texas Ranger who carried a Schofield rifle in a bedroll. He told the rabbits about the time the ranger was forced to sight down a wanted man who stood a thousand yards away at the bottom of a windy valley, the bad man’s pistol trained on a hapless widow and her daughter. He told the rabbits about how the ranger’s Schofield had cracked loud that sunny day, how a puff of smoke swept from the high ridge like a wisp of cloud, how the wanted man fell at the widow’s dusty boots.
The rabbits hopped in loose circles.
Sandy swept one up in his arms and held it beneath his chin, liking the soft,
silky feel of its fur. “Do you remember the farm?” he whispered in its ear. “The place where you were born? My daddy took me there. We drove all the way to Corsicana, just me and him. He said to me he knew a place where they had good bunnies for sale. He said we’d get two and show em in the county fair. Said we’d breed em, have ourselves a rabbit farm. Would you like that? To win a ribbon?”
Sandy put the rabbits back and locked their cages and went down to the pool.
He opened the chain-link gate and walked slowly around the rim, inspecting the piles of junk the man in the cowboy hat had made on the concrete patio. Here was an old aluminum lawn chair with a bent frame. There a mattress spring. A dented metal filing cabinet. In the deep end of the pool, the cowboy was separating empty paint cans from those with paint still sloshing in them. The dried paint around the rims of the cans was bright pink, much brighter than the faded pink of the motel now.
Sandy picked one of his old toys out of a pile, a plastic stunt-car driver in a star-spangled jumpsuit, face half melted by the heat of a charcoal grill, which had also ended up in the pool, its bottom rusted out. Sandy bounced the toy off a roll of rusted chicken wire. Near the shallow end, he picked up several shards of clay flowerpot and tossed them, one by one, into the pool, where each broke against the concrete near the three-foot mark.
“Don’t mess me up here,” the cowboy said from the far end of the pool. He did not look at Sandy.
“You like rabbits?” Sandy said.
The cowboy took off his black hat and wiped sweat from his forehead, then quickly put the hat back on. Pulled it low.
“I got two Netherland dwarf rabbits my daddy give me before he died, so I could show em in the fair. That’s just a few weeks off now. You wanna see em?”
“No thank you,” the cowboy said.
Sandy looked at the ropy muscle of the cowboy’s arms, reddening like the tip of a branding iron from the backs of his hands to where the sleeves of his T-shirt stretched. He had a tattoo, Sandy saw, a strange, puckered scar in the shape of an animal, a dog or a wolf. He couldn’t tell this far away.
In Valley of the Sun Page 3