“I’m fine,” she says finally. “Now. But I don’t know what I just drank. I wasn’t thinking. It was like iced tea, but it tasted like dirt and something else. Something like branches, or bark, and it stung a little. I can still taste it in the back of my throat.”
We roll up beside the two boys again and Blondlocks is hanging out the window waiting for us. “Dude,” he says to Corrina. “I should tell you that was cold brew.”
“Cold brew?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says, as if that answers everything.
“It’s fucking ’shroom tea, man,” the driver says. “You’ll be booming for hours.”
Corrina shakes her head.
“Hey,” Blondlocks says. “At least it’s clean.”
“Fuck you,” she tells him.
“Hey,” he pleads. “I was just trying to share.”
“You’re an idiot,” the driver tells him. “An idiot.” He leans over again, looking back and forth from the road to us, as both cars roll slowly forward toward the exit, following the rest of traffic. “Follow us, man,” he says. “I mean, like, she shouldn’t drive.”
“I’m right here,” Corrina says.
“You boomed before?” he asks her.
“Yeah,” Corrina says. “Of course.”
But of course she hasn’t, and I can tell she’s lying. He can too. “Just follow us,” he says. “You’ll need lots of water. And seriously. You can’t drive.”
Although I don’t trust these two fuckheads one bit, I know I’ll probably need more help than I realize, because although Gpa’s still snoring in the back, he’ll wake when we stop and I’ll have two people on my hands I won’t know what to do with. And Old Humper, as if he’s read my mind, or, more likely, he’s smelled the air of fear now heavy in the car, lifts his head and noses forward between the front seats as we follow their beat-up car and the rest of traffic onto the overpass and down into the darkening desert. As the sun sets, the clouds are wild swaths of violet and vermilion sweeping into the twilight sky.
Once we’re off the highway, the cars move more quickly and we speed with the rest of them toward what looks like a crown of gigantic yellow rocks breaking through the earth and spearing up into the sky. The traffic spills into a wide lot at the far end of the basin. An enormous amphitheater is built up into the largest rocks in the crown: Yellow Mountain. Corrina would be excited. This would be a kind of paradise for her, but it isn’t. I can see her trembling.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Is it doing something to you?”
“No,” she says quietly. “I’m just scared.”
“You should puke,” I tell her.
“What?”
“Puke it up. Get rid of it. As soon as possible.”
She looks at me, and I’ve never seen her so afraid. It’s not sadness—it’s a kind of fear I saw on Gpa’s face when he made me promise, Don’t let me forget her, the kind of fear that must come from knowing you’ve lost all control and something else is taking over.
“Pull over,” I tell her. “Just pull over now.” She does, and the two guys don’t realize—or maybe they do—and keep driving. It’s so much easier to pretend you care than actually put in the effort to do it.
Corrina steers the Blue Bomber into a little space between a couple of sage bushes and leaves the car running as she opens the door and runs behind one of the bushes, but it’s barely a barrier. I get out of the car and try to give her the privacy to stick her fingers in her throat, but I want to be a reach away if she needs me. And then, as soon as I hear it I smell it, and I rush over and hold back her hair as the brown spray fizzes in the dirt. When she finishes, her face is puffy with tears, and she steps away from me.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’m fine.” She stops, wobbles, and plops down, stumbling into a sitting position in the dust. She stares ahead toward the back of what must be the stage. The amphitheater rises beyond it, filling with people already dancing along with the warm-up acts. Most of the desert around the stage, around us, within this whole half of Yellow Mountain’s crown, has turned into a parking lot with a warren of streets between the rows of cars. People have set up little stalls in front of or behind their cars, and it is exactly like a village, as fuckhead #1 described it.
Between this pseudovillage and the stage, a giant, out-of-place fountain sends a column of water high into the air that dissolves in its own corona back down into the wide pool below. The multicolored lights aimed at the fountain make the water look like fireworks—but it is water, and that’s what Corrina needs.
I can’t leave Gpa on his own, so I head back to the Blue Bomber, turn it off, and wake him up. “What is this, Woodstock?” he says, and I can’t tell if he, too, is in a different mind, the surreal delusions of Alzheimer’s taking over, and it probably does look like what I imagine Woodstock looked like—half-naked people spinning in circles or rolling on the ground, clouds of smoke—but Gpa never went to Woodstock, so this is not a memory. He smiles and takes my hand. “Help me out of the car, Teddy.”
I get him and Old Humper back over to Corrina, who, thankfully, did not get up and wander away into the desert night. Instead, she just stares at the fountain, listening to the music, watching the light show on the thousand faces of the crowd rising up the slope of the amphitheater.
“Corrina’s sick,” I tell Gpa.
“I see,” he says.
She stands up, with my help, and I lead her over to the fountain, Gpa walking Old Humper alongside us, and just as we get there, there’s a roar in the crowd, a ballyhoo of lights, and a surge of sound that seems to erupt right out from the center of the earth beneath us, and it must be Father Lotus’s band, because Corrina starts jumping up and down, shouting, “This is what I want! This is what I want to do with my life!” and all I can hope is that she’s talking about the music. But she steps into the fountain and runs around with her tongue out, as if she’s drinking in the party-colored rain drop by drop. Old Humper chases after her. I’m freaking out that the cops will come, but there don’t seem to be any—it’s as if everyone has agreed to step away and just let this little oasis in the desert live outside the rules, outside time almost, a seething, writhing, chanting, throbbing mass of people with Father Lotus at the center of it all dancing, singing, and conducting the crowd of thousands like a mad, heavy-bearded priest casting out a pulsing web of music that rises up and blooms out over Yellow Mountain and us all.
For some people, this might seem like heaven, and maybe for a brief moment, it does for Corrina, too, but suddenly she stops, spins back around toward me and pukes again, right there in the fountain. Now she really pukes, and she falls to her knees, and I run in because when she falls, she goes face-first underwater.
I drag her out and sit by the edge with her as she heaves and heaves and nothing comes out, and then I help her wash her face, and she pulls me closer and I hug her with one arm and she hugs me with two, her head on my chest, and we stay like that, breathing, her head moving in rhythm with my chest, and I wonder if anybody else in the world feels like I do now, so free, so not alone, a word I fish for but can’t find, but don’t mind, because I know I’m living it.
We stay like that for a long while, and then, finally, she breaks from the hug and walks back over to Gpa.
“I’m sorry,” she says to him. This almost makes me laugh, because I know that by saying it to him, she’s also trying to say it to me.
“Sick, huh?” Gpa says. “You like this stuff?” he asks her, nodding to the concert, the last reaches of the light show from the stage and the fountain playing a faint kaleidoscope on his face.
“Yeah,” she says.
“It sounds like something I’ve heard before, and also like something I haven’t,” he says. “It’s entirely new, and yet it feels familiar.”
“Yeah?” Corrina says.
“That’s why you do covers, right? To make something your own out of what people thought they already knew?�
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“Yeah.”
“You’re a good kid,” he says to her.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says.
He puts his arm around her and she accepts it and leans into him, too, and while the Silver Fox might be cooler than me, I’m not jealous, because just like the parking lot out behind us is a kind of village, me, Corrina, Gpa, and Old Humper sure as hell feel like family out on the road together.
Gpa tells us we should head back to the car and dry off and look for more water to drink and as we walk back through the lot to find the Blue Bomber, there are people huddled around little gas stoves and fires, some people selling food—real food, nothing laced, like tamales and grilled cheese sandwiches—and bottles of water and soda, and we load up and talk to everyone else out there who’s been hoping for a miracle tonight. There are even still a few doped-out loners wandering around with one finger in the air, but they’re harmless, and I wish I had a ticket to give them.
Back at the car we eat our food and I make sure Corrina drinks at least two bottles of water and we listen to the music from the Father Lotus show. Gpa gets the ball out and plays fetch with Old Humper in the space between the rows of cars while Corrina and I sit out on the hood. Eventually they tire of their game and climb into the back seat.
“There’s that saying,” Corrina says. “ ‘They always get you in the end.’ That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“They,” Corrina says with venom. “They. They. They. They’re everywhere and they always win, and they always get you in the end. I’ve heard that before. And it’s right. This world’s not fair.”
“Then what’s the point of trying at all?”
“I don’t know, Hendrix. I don’t know. But I try anyway. I try because I think that’s all I’ve ever really known.” She glances at me. “I really hope Aiko calls back. A text, an e-mail, anything, man. I want into all this.” She waves off toward the stage. “Not as a fan, as a real player. I want in.”
“You will,” I say. “Whether she calls you back or not.”
I’m thinking about all the things I’ve heard Corrina say to me and all the things I’ve seen her do and the way I think her voice is as bold and necessary as the wind, as I look up at what are the brightest stars of the night. Mars, actually, a yellow-orange flash, and Spica, blue and bright and bursting against the purple twilight. The pair of them, rising ahead of all the others—Corrina’s constellation, I think—her name in the marquee of the sky.
“I think that’s what Gpa’s always tried to teach me,” I say. “To try. To believe, despite it all.”
“I bet,” Corrina says. “He loves you. He really does. You love him, too. It’s a thing to see.”
I look into the backseat of the Blue Bomber at Gpa. He’s dozing. There’s the faintest hint of a smile on his face, and I hope he’s dreaming of Gma, dreaming of their old front porch, of the way her whole waist fit in the crook of his arm, and the way he would lift her, like that, with one arm, dropping his bag and lifting his free hand to the back of her head as they kissed.
“Corrina,” I say as she looks out over the village toward the stage. “You’re going to make it. You are.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking about now,” she says. There are tears in her eyes. “My life is a clusterfuck. I don’t belong anywhere.”
I have no idea how to answer this without sounding like an asshole. How do I tell a person she does belong? That she belongs to her life, and her life—her self—is a good one? How do I say that? Isn’t the whole point of belonging that you feel it? “You’re not a clusterfuck,” I tell her.
“They, they.” She waves her hands in front of her face.
I take her hand in mine and begin to knead it. Her body relaxes and she turns her head to me. “Yeah,” I say. “But none of it makes you a clusterfuck.” I take a deep breath and try to say more. “I think there is a place where no one else belongs but us. Right here. You and me.”
“And your Gpa,” she adds. She smiles.
“Okay, him, too, and Old Humper.”
She breathes through her nose and leans into me. “What are you even doing right now?”
“I’m massaging your hand. I did it for Gpa one time he started to go a little nuts at Calypso, and he calmed down.”
“It kind of feels amazing.”
“That’s because you are literally tripping.”
“No.” She sniffs. “I’m not. Mostly I just feel exhausted, and a little disoriented. Like I’ve been awake for days.”
But there in the moonlight and starlight and with the glow of Father Lotus’s show on the rocks of Yellow Mountain around us, I begin to think about the campfire back in Flagstaff and how far we really have come.
“Corrina? Have you ever said ‘I love you’ to someone?”
She’s quiet for a moment and I’m afraid to look at her, afraid to say what I really want to say.
“I don’t know,” she says, but from the tone of her voice, I know she has. “I mean, the ex-hippies, of course.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“I don’t know. I thought I did once. Love someone.”
Although I’m shaking on the inside I try to keep as still as possible on the outside.
“I don’t know,” she says. “For most of my life I thought I looked so different from my friends, I thought I was so different from everyone else. I look back, and I hate how much I wanted to be pretty. I didn’t even know what I thought pretty was, but I wanted to be it, because I thought I wasn’t it.”
Her voice is so quiet and hushed and I feel so small in the enormity of the darkening desert around us, but still we’re close again, like we were in our tent, and it makes me feel as large as I need to be in this world.
“And yet,” I say, and take her hand, “you are, and that’s not even what makes you so lovable.”
“What does?”
“You can’t have one part of you without all the rest. It’s not about one part or another. It’s the whole you.”
“You know,” she says, “at school, even those nights on the boardwalk, you were always so bent over, I was forced to stare at the top of your head, even though you’re so damn tall. But now? Now it’s like you’ve straightened up or something. I can look up into your eyes. You have beautiful eyes, Hendrix.”
This puts me on a rocket ship and I’m already hurtling way past Pluto.
“Can I please kiss you?”
“Kiss me?”
“Yes.”
“The clusterfuck who smells like vomit?”
“Yes.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes!” she says, but then she reaches out and pulls me to her, and then we are really kissing right there on the hood of the Blue Bomber, right there with Gpa only a few feet away, which feels reckless and awesome, because it’s poetry in all the best meanings of the word, the two of us giving the middle finger to the universe, our rebellion against the they, because even if they do get us in the end, at least we’ve had this, each other, and while no matter how loud we shout, the universe wouldn’t hear us, or care, still we kiss and we kiss and we kiss and we know, however briefly, what it means to be alive.
But eventually, Gpa does make a little noise to remind us that he’s there, and Corrina has to go find someplace to go to the bathroom, and then I do, and it’s like everything is back to business, but I don’t want it to be. I only want to be in that dream with Corrina.
When I get back to the car, I can hear her singing and playing her guitar a little distance away, and I find her in the road, walking circles with Gpa, singing a song with him, “The Dark End of the Street.” I’ve learned enough by now to know it’s a song by James Carr, but that Corrina prefers Cat Power’s cover. She holds her guitar out in front of her as they pace and sing together and I know she’s trying to keep him rooted and calm, as I’m sure, as the night win
ds on, he’s slipped back into further confusion. “Someday they may come along and find us alone somewhere.” I let them sing, and they drift toward me under the marbled light of the moon.
When they finish the song, she gives him a hug and he accepts it, and he tells her about the time he found Gma in the vegetable garden behind their house, hunched down in the dirt in her Earth Shoes, singing that song. Gpa had carved out the plot for the garden, chopped up the yard, dug a shallow trench, and filled it with rich soil. The story is already in the HFB. He told it to us earlier.
When they’re back at the car, Corrina says to me, “I’m worried about driving on. I don’t think we should go any farther tonight. I can barely keep my eyes open. I think I need to sleep.”
“I think the world is already looking for us. There’s no use in pushing on tonight. They might get us tomorrow, though.”
“They haven’t gotten us yet, Hendrix.”
“What else can we do but try,” I say. I smile and kiss her, right there in front of Gpa. He scrunches his face up quizzically, but then he relaxes. He nods. At that moment, I don’t know where he is, or if he’s actually with me, but somehow I believe that deep down we’re exactly in tune with each other.
We settle Gpa in the front passenger seat and put the guitar in the driver’s seat so we can huddle down in the back together. Old Humper tucks himself into the footwell with Gpa, and Corrina and I hold each other. We wait until we hear Gpa snoring before we kiss again, and then we stop, because she’s too tired, and I just hold her in my arms.
We stay that way for a long time, but eventually she says very softly, “Hendrix, I think you might be my only real friend.”
“Me too.” I keep hugging her until her breath is calm and she is calm, and I realize she is finally asleep.
CHAPTER 20
CADILLAC RANCH
If you look at the state of Texas on a map, and imagine rotating the state clockwise so that what usually looks like its top hat is flipped to the bottom, the state will then look like a bird in flight, head held high, beak leading east—just as we fly east along the 40, turning time backward and upside down, our trip itself a kind of poem, making what was into what will be.
The Last True Love Story Page 15