Old Border Road

by Susan Froderberg

He picks the book up from the bedside table. Popular Cosmology. Popular cosmology? he says.

  I brought it with me, I say.

  Don’t forget the Bible, he says. That’s too a good read.

  Someday.

  That’s all right. When you get to the other side, God won’t cast you out because you weren’t interested. He doesn’t work in those ways.

  How could anyone ever know such a thing?

  It’s beyond language, he says. Therefore, impossible to explain.

  I’m just fine without an answer to the question why, I say.

  He smiles and touches my hand.

  I have no place to go.

  Tell me.

  There’s a tap on the wood. The door opens just enough for the Mexican man to put his head into the room to speak. Padre, he says.

  Come back to make the room up later, Jesús. Gracias, Jesús.

  The door closes and the Padre turns back to me. I’m here to help you work through what you must, he says. That’s what I’m here for. I’m here as your teacher. I’m here as your guide.

  IT WAS ALREADY midday before I got back to Old Border Road. I arrived into a different commotion of sorts, with Son and the hired man and a new cadre of Mexicans moving busily about the south field. The hired man had run the disc around the perimeter of the bermuda to make a firebreak and was now tractoring back to the canalbank. The Mexican men stood lined along the bar ditch with drip torches and fire swatters and waterjugs in hand. Son conducted this business astrut in the midst of them—pivoting on a bootheel and pointing directions out, taking his cap off and scratching his head and putting the cap back on again, shoo’ing the old dog aside time after time. The watertruck clacked and bucked over the corrugated drive, and I slowed it down but kept going, not looking Son’s way. I took the lane through the whitewashed old trees, the fruit hanging leathered and shriveled in the heat, driving on and then braking to a stop in front of the house. The watertruck shuddered to a quit. It hadn’t even begun to tick to a cool by the time Son had caught up to it and had the door open and was grabbing me by the fistfuls, dragging me out to where there’s a flare of my heart in a moment of hope. I thought he was about to take me into his arms and I’m ready to cling to him and breathe him in as he tells me he’ll never again let me go. But instead he hauled me out of the cabfront and flung me aside, reached in, and threw the suitcase and satchel out too, cursing that I’d held him up by disappearing in the first place and by taking my time about getting the watertruck back. He didn’t even look me in the eye. He just climbed up into where I had been, and clutched and grinded and shifted and took off in a huff, leaving a powdery cloud of earth behind in the wake.

  I waved the dirt away and turned toward the house and went inside. This all-over feeling of being new here came over me, that sense of not belonging, of being placeless. Even in the bedroom we shared, I could lay no claim. You could see how the bed had been slept in in the night without me, the way the sheets were bunched and tossed. You could see the press of Son’s head left as it was on the pillow. A nearly full cola bottle sat like some guest on the table next to the bed. I went into the kitchen, where there was a pot of coffee left to go cold on the stove, a mug with half the drink still in it, stains ringing the countertop, spills of something flyspecked and sticky, a plate with remains of beans and yolk and tortilla. A dirty pan was set into the sink among a bunch of crunched eggshells and splatters of red sauce and grease. So he can manage to eat without me, in any case.

  The old adobe house creaked and groaned, as if it were digesting a meal. My stomach felt hollow and wringing. I gazed out the kitchen window, past the dead but still-clinging stalk of the climbing rose, past the withered heads of the old lemon trees and out toward bursts of dust moving along the empty road. The world was weighted differently now, as maybe it is when you believe you’re suddenly and truly alone. I had known this cloister of solitude before, known it as a kind of truth, you might say, making every piece of sky you see more prized, and any music you hear turned more serious to the ear, every look in every eye necessarily meaning everything.

  I opened the screendoor and went out the back way and looked about. Son was over by the melon shed standing among the hired men, likely discussing how they would manage the blaze while figuring in the wind. I’ve been in on a few of these burns on burn days, back when I stayed side by side with Son most of the time. I had listened to the caution and the reasoning, seen the ways of managing. I had seen the flanks of fields ignite and arise, seen great chains of fire run aleap like feral animals in a chase, watched the angry kindle until it begins to dim, until the smoke rises higher, until it blackens and drifts, seen the way everything gets turned so quickly to nothing.

  I went back into the house to collect some things, passing by our wedding picture and turning it facedown on the table. I could smell the smell of fire by the time I had put a few more shirts into the suitcase and was choosing another book to put into the satchel. I went out to the porch and could see the flare of a backfire downwind of the burn site. The head of the site combusted in warning-colored light, and soon the entire field burst into flame—the whole thing turning wild and trembling, the air shaking feverishly, all of everything looking aswim and awave, the fire burning in raging shapes that boiled and hurled outward and upward into the ether. A mass of towering smokecloud gathered and spiraled above. Then it was done—like that—the fire gone out, the charred and simmering field turned an absolute black, a few serpents of smoke coiling up here and there. There was a glimmer of metal that sparked along the road, and through the carbon and smoke the watertruck appeared.

  Son pulled up to the front of the house. He got out and came toward the porch and saw me sitting there on the steps with the suitcase and satchel. His clothes and skin were black with ash and soot, as if he had been up inside a chimney or come out of a coal mine or been in some story where he would be the bad guy. He took his cap off. His putty-colored forehead and sandy-colored hair were oddly pale next to the black rest of his clothes and his skin. He had a disagreeable, if not a riled, look in his eyes. Now I could see other things about him that were unappealing—the centipede-like scar on his forehead, the blisters on his lip, his set-too-close-together eyes—and I was glad for every bit of distance it put in between us. I was glad for whatever it is that makes it easier to leave.

  He looked at the suitcase. Now what? he said.

  I had more of my stuff to get, I said.

  Well, you can’t take the watertruck with you again.

  Then I’ll take the pickup.

  You can’t take the pickup.

  What else have I got to take?

  That’s your problem, I guess, ain’t it?

  I was gratefully put off by his stance and way of speaking. He walked past me and went into the house and let the screendoor slap behind him. I got up and went to find the hired man.

  Sure, Missus, he said. Fire’s douted now. I be happy to give you a lift into town.

  SIX

  HARTRY

  The hired man squints into the noon sun, his face raccooned with ash and soot from the burn, and then he becks his head at the Ambassador, curbed in the dirt and baking in the day’s heat, happy, he says, to do the acquainting. The idling thing is an oversize, sand-eaten, and bister-colored old four-door, sun-bleached and patchworked and seeming foreign inside, with a reek of old cigar smoke and diesel grease and a kind of oiliness or spiciness not easy to identify. A deity of some alien notoriety dangles from a string affixed to the rearview, a yawning opening holes the panel where the radio should go, and spongy filling creeps through the rents of the leather bench seating. The sill of the back dash is bedecked with an array of billed caps labeled with various feed names and fertilizer brands. But for back and front windshield, the glass in the windows of the vehicle no longer exists, and hot dust boisters in on us, setting the caps aflutter as soon as we’re moving. The engine rumbles along between hitches of sputters and coughs and pings, and black smoke bill
ows out the tailpipe like crepe-paper Halloween frills. I fan the calamity away from my face and tell the hired man that I believe your rings need cleaning, and he looks at me and lifts the cap off his head and then dons it again and tells me, You can say that again, Missus. He grins, showing a gummy orifice where there ought to be teeth.

  What’s happened to your radio? I say.

  Allow me, he says.

  He reaches across my lap and pops the glovebox open and brings a transistor out, which he hangs by the wrist loop onto the rearview along with the swaying deity. Then he thumbs a switch on it that lets go a scratchy mariachi song. He puts a foot to the gas, getting more backfire than heave, and he taps a beat out on the steering wheel, moving us along like this to the music.

  After a time we’re come into town. We’re riding down Main and I’m all the while looking out from the passenger side, wondering what people are wondering who are looking in at me.

  You can drop me off at the coffee shop.

  Much obliged, Missus.

  He swivels the wheel with the flat of a hand and swings us into the lot. I gather my belongings and muscle the stiff door open, the hinges and the joints of the Ambassador groaning like an old man, the dust bleeding out of its gutters and seams. I thank the hired man again through the glassless frame, calling him Hartry, as is his name, and he responds with that gappy smile and a touch to the bill of his cap.

  Just as it would happen, there’s someone I know sitting in the window of the coffee shop. It’s Ham, holding a mug to his lips and looking out my way. He twists about in the booth and signals me over as soon as I’ve come through the door. I go over and put the suitcase under the table and slide into the seat across from him.

  What are you doing riding about with the hired man for? he says.

  Son said he wouldn’t drive me into town.

  Why not drive yourself into town, then?

  He said no to the pickup and no to the watertruck, either one.

  What happened to the sedan?

  He sold it.

  What you lugging that suitcase around for?

  My clothes are in it.

  Your clothes.

  I nod my head.

  Oh, he says.

  The swamp coolers cool it nice in here, I say.

  You want something to eat or drink?

  Iced tea is fine.

  A fly lights on the table and Ham whacks it flat with the back of his menu. People at tables around us jerk to attention. Some of them turn their heads, look at Ham, look at me, see the suitcase, think what they think. The waitress comes over and Ham hands her the menu, showing her the red splat. She puckers her mouth and gives him a look. Then she leans over him and swabs the fly blood off the table with a dishtowel.

  It’s one way to get your attention, Ham says.

  What’s it today? she says.

  Grilled cheese, extra cheese. And bring the little girl here an iced tea.

  Ham watches the waitress walk away. She’s sweet on me, he says.

  She’s been here forever, I say.

  Just about, he says. He arranges his knife and his fork in their proper places.

  What you plan on doing? he says.

  There’s a place I used to rent that might still be vacant, I say.

  You can come and settle out at our outpost, he says.

  The waitress comes back and sets a full plate before him and a glass of tea in front of me. She gives Ham another one of her looks. He gives her a look back. She turns and walks away.

  You can be my guest, Ham says, at least till the gals be homecome again. And till you and Son are able to settle whatever of yourn needs to be settled, he says.

  He offers me part of his grilled cheese and a few said-before words about being married. He says things about the workings of matrimony not being as easy as people would have us believe, more so after the gambol and the frolic of the honeymoon are over. He tells me times are especially trying for the newly married, as couples haven’t yet the know-how or the skill-of for what it takes as to the workings of the setup.

  Often as not, he says, young kids such as yerselves succumb to the husband-and-wife routine with nothing but simple mimicry as any kind of guide, meaning that of which has been commonly done by common others come before. They brand each other with their wedding rings and too soon get caught in a loblolly of the unforeseen, he says. They get penned in and choused about and confused by all of what’s expected of ’em.

  Ham’s face is lined with ruts and gullies, his slate-colored eyes set deep. His voice is caged and pitched from the depths of his chest, and his words are passed up and raked through the gravel and scrape of his throat. He goes on to say something about Son and how as a husband he ought to be treating me more delicately, regardless of unsettling things that have gotten in our way. He says something about Son being lost—poor kid! poor the both a yous!—says how it takes time aplenty to get over a tragedy such as the one we’ve been hit with. As he speaks, the very sentences break and fade into air, the way the ice in my glass disappears into tea. We sit across from each other in the booth, Ham yet talking and me listening from a distance. We sit in the dissolve of afternoon light flooding in on us through the windows, light exactly such as I have seen it before in here, making the place ever more known for the time spent in it. The light runs awash over the backless stools and over the row of red vinyl’d bench seats posted at each windowed booth. It pours across the wide aisle of checkered linoleum in between. I see myself up and moving about the place, slowly, as if moving through water or part of a dream, filling orders and coffee cups, as I used to do, speaking into the steamy hole of the kitchen as I clip my ticket to the chrome wheel. I am not so long ago a girl in school and working here evening shift, yet the span of those days seems hardly as if it could be. How can it all be the same and yet nothing is? How does time get away and then show itself back, right where it was and it is again? I’m reciting the day’s litany of baked pies and fresh cakes, remembering every name. I’m standing beneath the overhead globes, bringing forth and carrying away, smiling casually, while all the while keeping an eye out for that someone or other who should walk in the door and spark my eye. I never knew who it was I was looking for. I only believed that one day the whoever it was it was supposed to be would walk in and find me and put a stop to the longing. And he would say to me, Sorry to have kept you such a long time waiting.

  It is but one of the myths people tend to be roweled around by for the better part of their lives, Ham says.

  I look into the old stone eyes. What is? I say.

  Marriage, he says. You’re not listening, is you?

  The waitress comes toward us, and as she does, Ham lifts his coffee mug at her. I turn to look through the window’s powdered-over glass as she makes small-town chatter and pours the refill. Outside, ropes of dust pay out across a rain-shadowed and fevered land. The sun burns hot atop the macadam, turning it from a licoricy solid to a hellish liquid. Paint jobs fade from every car and truck parallel’d and slotted in the lot. Buckled crusts of shaled earth splinter and fin in the bake. Tumbleweeds skitter past in the dearth.

  Ham lifts the coffee mug to his lips and blows the steam and the hot off it. He takes a cautious sip. He says, I want to do my best to help you two arbuckles out. I want you to know that I am able to help Son get more work if need be. The desalting plant is about to get a thumbs-up, and as I know the señors running the outfit I might be able to bespeak Son a job. And until the meantime, the boy could help me out at my spread, as there’s a lot of work needs doing before bronc’n and bull’n time. Asides, it might just be that a life of sodbusting has come to be too much of a struggle, and maybe it ain’t worth it to him anymore with the old man gone. It would still be possible to sell the entire place, and likely yet profitable given the water rights that come with it. You kids might be better off. Hell, I might even buy the place myself, if Pearl gives her say-so. She’s a better mind about these sorts of deals than me.

  He til
ts his head back and empties the mug. Then he reaches into his hip pocket and tugs his wallet out and drops a couple of bills next to the ticket. He offers to carry the suitcase for me and I grab the satchel and follow. He picks his hat from the stand as we’re leaving and flags a good-bye to the waitress, moving toward the exit in that stiff-hipped swagger of his. He opens the door, the dust drifting in like fog, and we walk outside to the blast of heat that awaits us.

  Ham’s rig is parked in the choppy shade of a date palm across the lot. He opens the passenger door of the crewcab of it, and I climb up and slide inside to a woolly heat and onto the burn and stick of naugahyde seating, arranging my legs around the suitcase Ham has put at my feet. He comes around to the driver’s side and gets in and starts the engine and soon we are slithered onto Main Street snakewise, the empty horse trailer abuck and arattle behind us. It’s the hot and quiet part of the day, known commonly as siesta time, as most anyone would know without my saying so. The few vehicles we pass on the road are filled with drivers who drive sleepily, as if the hot air were too thick to move through, their driving become a mix of the afternoon hour and an old-timer style. I roll my window up to keep the dust out, then roll it down to let the wind come back in. Soon I have almost got a system.

  I sit back and take the views of town in as we move through. We pass by the only hotel, its sign boasting of a swimming pool and a banquet hall and a honeymoon room. We pass the jewelry shop, and a sinking feeling comes over me when I see the blown-up wedding photograph of me and Son that Mr. Gomez has postered up in the window to help him sell his diamond rings. We pass the grocery store, its windows butcher-papered over with prices and sales for the week, and I scan them out of habit, then realize with a catch in my gut there’s no reason now to take heed. We drive by the five-and-dime, drive by the laundromat, the tortilla factory, and the tack and feed, by the liquor and hardware and paint. We get to the end of town and come to a span of concrete and steel, the water below the bridge now diminished to creeping eels. Aside the river is spread the historic prison, its legend vast and its name famous. Now the wooden frame of it is propped up and stove in, and its stone edifice is rubbled over and patched together by whatever it takes to mend it. Its guards of iron palings tine shadows in silica and gypsum and scrub. Its sallyport casts an archway of shade over ghosts that are said to come and go about the place. We drive over the bridge and our silence is drowned by a steady whooooooh sound, like somebody blowing across the mouth of an empty bottle. Then we’re to the other side of the bridge and we hit blacktop and are abruptly brought back to the world of audibly solid boundaries.