Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  I wasn’t. Phillip was my first real boyfriend—more real than I was ready for.

  We had been spending the night at each other’s houses for months, cuddling and kissing before falling asleep side by side. This was enough for me; it was perfect. Why did he have to slide his hand up under my t-shirt? Why did he have to guide my hand into his underpants? Why did he have to make me shove his chest with the palm of my hand and ask him to turn around and sleep with his head at my feet?

  Reaching out, Phillip pushed me away. It took a while, but the cords of our first love had been cut and were beginning to unravel. By spring, we were arguing all the time. Every fight left me mortally wounded, and I staggered around school like Ophelia on her way to the river. But Phillip, who used to be so compassionate, didn’t even notice. He began to spend weekends with the twenty-year-old chick who ran the Sunbringer, the thrift store at the end of Bent Street. And then one day a girl named Tammy came to school wearing Phillip’s favorite Levi’s jacket, and I knew I had lost him.

  Unmoored, adrift, I drew pictures of giant eyes with teardrops dripping from the corners, while Phillip leapt into his life and away from me, like a golden stag, or a supernova.

  5

  MEXICO AGAIN

  Dad picked us up from school one day and informed us that Mom and Ramón had taken a drive to Santa Fe and decided to keep going, all the way to Mexico. They had called my father at Joe’s, where he cooked and washed dishes, and asked him to ask me if I’d be interested in meeting them at the border. I said I would.

  Mom knew that Phillip and I had just had a huge fight. Phillip and his brother had shot at some dogs that were chasing their chickens. They didn’t hit them, but still. I had launched an eloquent diatribe about cruelty to animals, and Phillip had flicked the air between us as if I were a mosquito and walked away. I needed to get out of town.

  It’s not as if Dad was surprised by Mom’s spontaneous road trip with another man. Mom and Ramón had been totally into each other ever since they met on the beach in the Yucatan two years before. Although no one spelled it out, Ramón had even moved from Florida to Taos with his wife, Willie, so he could be closer to my mother. Mom had seemed supremely unsurprised when the pair bounced up the dirt road in their van one day, and Willie deposited Ramón and peeled away. Mom politely asked Carlos, my father’s best friend and my mother’s current lover, to please gather his things and leave, which Carlos, with a good-natured shrug, did.

  Dad had already moved out and settled into a one-room adobe shack on the ridge above our house in the Valdez Valley. There he read cards. Many pilgrims came seeking my father’s esoteric guidance. He would seat them at the table (a recycled cable spool), pour himself a jelly jar of Tokay wine, light a Pall Mall and let it burn like incense in the ashtray beside him, and take the seeker’s hands in his own for a moment.

  “Close your eyes, now,” he said. “Let’s tune.” And they would tune.

  Then he would unfurl a cosmic weather report, as revealed by the array of clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. Dad’s love of bridge had shifted to this ancient system of divination in which modern playing cards have their roots.

  Dad had started drinking when he got the news that his not-anymore-wife and her lover were running away to Mexico, and he had been drinking ever since.

  Amy and Roy clambered into the back of the van with me in the Da Nahazli parking lot. They immediately started searching for Herbie, the field mouse that had taken up residence in our dad’s vehicle. Roy pulled a wad of dirty tortilla from his pocket and clicked his tongue in hopes of getting Herbie’s attention. At six, Roy was fierce. His enormous green eyes glittered beneath a canopy of dark lashes. Late to talk, Roy communicated by biting whoever crossed him. But when I gathered him into my arms and stroked his hair, he would grow quiet and agreeable.

  Roy was a loner. He spent most of his time creating complicated scenarios for his plastic army men, using mounds of dirt and fistfuls of tall grass. It was clear from the way he muttered to himself as he played that Roy’s worlds were real, inhabited by good guys and bad guys, and that Roy was the hero of his own journey. In the regular world he was often forgotten, but in Roy Land he sallied forth, sword in hand, breeze through his hair, and everyone made way for the king.

  Amy was also royalty. Her long blond hair cascaded down to her hips in glimmering waves. Pale blue eyes, plump lips, ivory skin. From the time she could tie her own shoes, Amy began to change her clothes three or four times a day, depending on which way the wind blew. She might start off as a ballerina before breakfast, and by lunchtime she had transformed into a cowgirl. Then she would dress for dinner in a hand-me-down party dress and platform heels five sizes too big that she had rummaged from the free box in front of Amigos Food Co-op. Amy knew what she liked and was quite clear about what displeased her. Hippies who didn’t bathe, for instance. Our parents’ refusal to have television. Vegetarian food.

  At nine, Amy and her best friend, Zoe, were honorary fairies dwelling in Fairyland. They made dolls from hollyhock blossoms, turning the deep red flowers upside down so that the petals became skirts. The little girls enlisted me to help build a pool in the Hondo River below our house using rocks and branches. We called it God’s Tear. This is where Amy and Zoe did most of their communing with the Little People.

  After Amy finished reading the Narnia books for the second time, she cried. I happened to walk into room just as the sadness was hitting her.

  “What’s the matter, Ames?”

  “I will never be able to go there!” she sobbed. “And I can’t stand it.”

  Dad drove us to town with a can of beer between his thighs. We pulled up to the bus depot in Taos just as the sun was setting. It was early March. Winter was still clinging to the valley. I shifted my duffle bag from one shoulder to the other and hugged my father, who swayed a little in my embrace. Then he stepped back and felt around in the pocket of his jeans.

  “Here.” He slipped a couple of hits of blotter acid (pressed into a book of food stamps) into the bib-pocket of my overalls. “A peace offering for your mom.”

  “Okay. Bye, Daddy.”

  “So long, Cookie.”

  Just like that, I climbed the stairs to the idling bus and found my seat. I gazed out the window as Dad drove away. I watched my town going about its ordinary sunset business as if nothing extraordinary were happening inside this bus, about to grind into gear and head south to the Mexican border.

  Mom and Ramón met me in El Paso, and we crossed over the border into Ciudad Juárez, making our way down the west coast to San Blas. We searched for an isolated beach, but those days were over, so we settled for a campsite with reasonable boundaries and set up our tents among the gazillion other campers on Playa de los Cocos. Mom and her lover proceeded to explore their relationship, and I read Justine by Lawrence Durrell, wrote love poems to Phillip in my sketchbook, adopted a flea-infested dog that I took into my tent to sleep with me at night, and walked for miles up and down the beach, seeking solitude. I alternated between determination to do whatever it took to patch things up with the love of my life the minute I got home and breaking up with him once and for all.

  Upon my return from one such melancholy sojourn, I found Mom and Ramón sitting on a blanket smoking a joint. This was not unusual. I sat down beside them but did not take a toke. Ever since I had lost my mind at the Magic Tortoise party last spring I had a hair trigger for altered states of consciousness. Someone would say something like, “I feel strange,” because their stomach was unsettled or they wondered if they had left a pot of beans boiling on the stove, and I would slip into that dream zone again and then have to claw my way back to reality. My entire drug career had lasted from age twelve to thirteen.

  Mom was topless, her long batik skirt gathered around her thighs. She leaned back on her elbows, looking like a Maxfield Parrish painting. Ramón sat beside her and handed her the joint. I rummaged through the cooler and found an orange Fanta.

  “How was
your walk?” Mom asked.

  “Good. I met this girl named Maria. Her grandpa owns the cantina down the beach. They invited us to come over and eat.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.”

  Suddenly Ramón grabbed the baggie of dope and shoved it under the blanket. He stuffed my mom’s bikini top into her hands and hissed, “Put this on.”

  As my mother fumbled with the strings, two federales came striding up the beach to our campsite.

  “Qué es esto?” the taller officer asked, turning back the edge of the blanket with the tip of his rifle and exposing the little plastic bag of weed.

  “Oregano,” said Ramón.

  “Mota,” the guy corrected him.

  “No hablo español,” said Ramón.

  “Bullshit,” said the officer. “Levántese. Venga conmigo.”

  But Ramón did not get up, and he did not go with them. He continued to cultivate a blank stare. The second guy tried to pull him to his feet. Ramón went limp. It was then that the federales noticed his miniature leg, and they looked at each other, momentarily confounded. I took this opportunity to throw myself at the feet of the first guy, wrap my arms around his knees, and beg him not to take my mama and my papa to jail. He ignored me. But a crowd of people had gathered around to watch the spectacle. They probably figured we had it coming, with our public nudity and flagrant drug use. I kind of thought so myself.

  We spent the next hour locked in negotiations. Actually, I was the one doing all the negotiating. We had wordlessly agreed that my mother and her lover would feign illiteracy—even stupidity—while I would be the designated Spanish speaker.

  And so I negotiated away all the money in Ramón’s wallet and my mom’s woven change purse. I negotiated away every last flake of their pot stash. And finally, when they were about to haul Ramón off to jail, I negotiated away his van.

  They shouldn’t have let me be in charge.

  I should have let them take him.

  In my explorations of the ex-patriot beach community, I had befriended Dick—a former insurance salesman from Indiana—a week or so earlier, who was renting an open-air palapa not far from our campsite. Dick had already become drinking buddies with Ramón (who dubbed him “Ricardo”) and an obvious admirer of my mom. He paid attention to me, too, but not in a creepy way. He asked about my life back home in Taos, showed genuine interest in what I was reading, and brought me bags of fried pork rinds and Mexican chocolate bars from his beer runs to the village. Ricardo had one leg and one arm, as a result of a drunk driving accident years before.

  But the most relevant fact was that Ricardo had an old white sedan he called “LaBelle Ford,” and so I enlisted him to drive us home to Taos. He said it sounded like an adventure. We would leave at the end of the week. In the meantime, Ricardo would loan us a few bucks to get by.

  That afternoon Ramón got drunk, picked a fight with Mom, and disappeared into the underbelly of San Blas. My mother responded by dropping the acid my father had given her, grabbing my hand, and running down the beach at sunset, leaping over driftwood and fire pits, her arms flung forward in a graceful arc, her legs thrust behind her like a modern dancer. I raced along beside her, trying to keep up. I couldn’t. I let go of her hand and grabbed my knees, gasping for air. As the sky grew dark, her outline faded into the distance, and then she was gone.

  Really gone. I could not see her. I could not hear her.

  “Mom?”

  No answer.

  “Susy!”

  From far below me, I heard a muffled cry. I scrambled to the edge of what turned out to be a bluff and peered down into the darkness. I could hear my mother’s tiny whimper at the bottom of the cliff.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “I think I’ve broken something.”

  “Wait. Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

  And so commenced the longest night of my life. I scrambled down the embankment in the dark and managed to hoist my mother from the sand, thread her arm around my shoulder, and drag her, hopping, back up the bluff to the path that led to the cantina I had discovered a million years ago that week.

  A string of Christmas lights lit up the outdoor tables and ranchero music blared from the speakers as we staggered onto the scene. Maria’s grandfather came from behind the bar and took my mother’s other arm. He led us to a table and pulled up a folding metal Dos Equis chair to prop Mom’s rapidly swelling foot, which was also turning purple. I explained that my mother had fallen off a cliff and needed a doctor. He said we would not be able to reach anyone till morning, but we were welcome to spend the night in his bedroom behind the cantina, and he would sleep in his hammock on the beach.

  Mom nodded, her face a veil of pain.

  “Don Pancho, a sus órdenes.” He extended his hand to my mom, who smiled as warmly as she could manage and returned his handshake.

  “Susana. Mucho gusto.”

  “Come.”

  For the second time that day, we were the center of attention. All the drinkers had stopped drinking and the talkers had stopped talking. A dozen pairs of eyes followed us as we conveyed my broken mother through the bar. Don Pancho led us to his cement room beneath a thatched roof out back. The room was bare, except for a mattress on the floor, covered with a woven blanket, a shelf where he kept a couple of folded pairs of pants, and a rack with wooden dowels for an extra shirt and a spare straw hat.

  My mom stretched out on the bed and winced. Then she bit her lip and moaned. I knew she must be in unbearable pain to be expressing anything at all. It almost seemed as if Matty’s death had created an unspoken rule in our family that if you’re not dying, you don’t have a right to complain, because (according to family legend, anyway) Matty endured all those horrors and never even whined. Or maybe it was just that, for Mom, no mere physical discomfort was worthy of notice in comparison to the anguish of losing a child. But that night her customary dignity crumbled, and my mother began to quietly cry, lying on her back, the tears rolling down from the corners of her eyes and dribbling into her hair.

  I couldn’t stand it. I ran out of the room and into the cantina. Don Pancho was standing behind the bar, mixing Cuba Libres. “Do you have something for my mother to drink?” I asked. “Something to . . . help her sleep?”

  The old man waggled his eyebrows, held up an index finger, and bent down. He emerged with a half a bottle of tequila. “This will knock her out.” And he handed me the liquor with a wink.

  Mom was not a drinker. I had to coax her to take a few sips, then a few more. It took hours to finish what was left in the bottle. In between, she would sleep fitfully, and just as I was drifting off myself, she would have to crawl out the door to the filthy outhouse behind the cantina and pee. I did not know there were so many hours in a night. Around a thousand, I think.

  When the edges of the room finally began to turn gray, I leapt to my feet. “I’m going to find Ramón and Ricardo, and we’ll get you out of here.”

  “Okay,” Mom whispered. She was folded in herself, lying very still, as if she would shatter if she moved.

  I tracked down the two hungover men, and we raced up the beach in LaBelle Ford to rescue my mom. Ricardo tried to pay Don Pancho for his assistance, but the old man refused. He helped us load Mom into the car, kissed the top of her head, and asked God to bless us all. We spent the day in a dingy hospital in Tepic, where x-rays revealed multiple shattered bones in Mom’s foot.

  It no longer made sense to wait a week to head home to Taos. As soon as Mom’s cast had set, we returned to Playa de los Cocos, packed our few possessions into Ricardo’s car, and headed north. Ricardo, with his one leg and one arm, was the driver. Ramón, his polio leg locked in a brace, sat beside him in the front seat. Mom sat in the back with me, her broken foot resting in my lap.

  LaBelle Ford was old. Her upholstery was torn, and the back passenger window was stuck halfway up, halfway down. This was fine for the first hundred miles or so, but after that the constant roaring wind began to
give me a headache. That, plus the fact that by this time we had to ration our meager funds and so were subsisting on roasted peanuts and Coca Cola. Plus Ricardo was blasting Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson all through the Mexican countryside as we drove. And drove and drove.

  Forty-eight hours later, we pulled up the driveway to our house in the valley of Valdez. I hurled myself out of the car, hungry, cold, disoriented as hell. Dad was standing in the doorway.

  “Hi, Tootsie,” he said to me, ignoring his ex-wife and her lover and our one-armed driver. He took my hand in his. “Come with me. There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Dad led me inside, took me into Mom’s bedroom, closed the door, and seated me on the edge of the bed. Then he knelt in front of me and looked into my eyes. I squirmed and looked away.

  “Someone died,” I whispered, heart pounding.

  He nodded.

  “Grandma?”

  “Phillip.”

  “Phillip?”

  “He was killed in a gun accident the day before yesterday.”

  “Gun accident?”

  I don’t remember what really happened next. If I collapsed in tears or narrowed my eyes at my father as if he was pulling my leg. If I pressed my dad for details or numbly nodded my head. What I do remember is that I grabbed a jacket and walked up to the road to hitchhike to Phillip’s house. I needed to see Nora, Phillip’s mom. I needed to see his sister, Zoe, and his brother, Eric, who were there when the 22-caliber rifle discharged at the prime angle. I needed my little sister, Amy, who had gone over to comfort her best friend.