by Peter Craig
She knelt beside her father and saw that he was still breathing. She touched his forehead and was alarmed by how terribly hot and damp he was in the cold air. She could see the ghost of his breath, faintly luminous in the moonlight. Lying down, she rested against him, wiggling her shoulders, and this time he didn’t flinch in pain.
She was so thirsty and hungry that her insides felt scraped and hollow.
She dozed, and when she woke a few hours later she could feel that the sand packed around her father had turned cold. Shocked by the change, she scrambled a few feet away and in the pale light she looked back at him. “No, Dad. Come on.”
For a long time she rocked, with her face in her cupped hands, afraid to look at him. When the light returned, tracing the mountaintops and coloring a few blurred jet trails overhead, she sat down beside him.
He had been awake when he died. Now he stared up at the sky, eyes glassy and lighter than she remembered, sand and dried blood on the new gray stubble forming on his cheeks, his lips hovering in a shape as if he were about to whistle. He was buried in shallow sand, over his suit pants, across his bare arms, which were faintly outstretched as if for the beginning of a snow angel.
Lydia felt numb and was unable to cry. She knew that she couldn’t get him out of this ravine, but she couldn’t stand the idea of leaving him this way. She loathed those coyotes, filthy and savage, and thought of them now as if they had been evil spirits. All that morning before the first clear light, she dug in the sand of the arroyo, cracking her fingers and bleeding from under the nails. She was still digging when the sun rose high overhead and roasted down onto her bare neck. She checked the ridge above and saw that the Impala had gone, and she returned and continued gouging up handfuls of silt, beginning to feel faint moisture below. Deeper still, there was a puddle forming. She cupped it and drank the water, her mouth full of sand.
She dug for hours that afternoon, and finally buried her father, choking as she covered him with silt and earth. Afterward, she marked the spot with black rocks, hoping that she could find it someday, return and reclaim him, put him properly into the ground. She didn’t know if he was a real Christian; she didn’t know if he would care. But she thought now that there was a reason for doing what was supposed to be done—every grave, she thought, was a barricade against the wilderness, against this chaos and solitude. Her throat was burning and her eyes stung, and she lay down on the soft ground, baking in the heat.
She tried to imagine what he would say to her now: He would yell at her; he would tell her to get moving. So she rose and struggled toward the back of the chasm, climbing up scree and loose granite, holding on to roots and weeds, and finally emerging onto the broken, undulating terrain that led into the Chocolate Mountains.
It was slow going. Dehydrated and sunburned, she struggled ahead in the slanted light to where the shade was cold and dry. The land was a vast cracked stretch of gray and pink mountains and she traversed it uphill into the first dim canyons. At her feet, like her father had said, she saw steel and shrapnel, the torn casings of bombs, the scattered debris of crushed mountains.
She climbed a narrow ridge along a mountain, and when she reached the top, she was demoralized by the view: She had gone the wrong way. The landscape unfolded in all directions, nothing but carved channels through foothills and juts of striped peaks, spanning out like rough seas. She continued downhill in the shade, dizzy, with a ghostlike feeling of disconnection. She began to feel far away from her shambling feet, watching the elongating arrow of her shadow down the rocks.
When night came, it was frigid cold. She woke several times from a delirious sleep, feeling as if someone had touched or sniffed her. The air was stinging. She heard animals or footsteps, thousands of yards away, projected to her in the motionless air.
The next morning she woke and was too weak to stand. Her head throbbed, her eyelids were swollen, her mouth was pasted shut. The light was painful on her pupils, and she worried that she had burned them and blinded herself. She was still trembling from exposure to the cold, and she lay on the rocks for a long time, gathering heat like a reptile. She felt like crying, but no tears came; and when she sat up, she began dry heaving, pulling up nothing but acid and bile. She was being yanked inside out. She rose and tried to walk farther, hoping to find some road or feature in the distance. But there was more gravity holding her in place than impelling her forward. Her legs were stiff; her knees locked; she grew so frustrated that she lay down on a patch of dust beneath the hard sun.
She made a circle in the sand and waited inside it, pretending that it was the entire world and that she’d never have to leave. The sun cooked down on her, and she tasted blood from her cracked lips. She had been hurt in her life, here and there, but now something had overpowered her, and she was surrendering to the grief, allowing it to grab her and flatten her to the ground. It had sapped every thought of tomorrow or the world beyond these mountains; it was drying her out and turning her bones to chalk. She was desolate, and she hated herself like a traitor. She would not ask to be saved or forgiven, but decided that she deserved to die in this circle, punished, bled from under her nails. She would suffer because she had believed only in suffering; she would hurt because she had craved it like the truth. What had she done wrong, why was she dying? Her skin was peeling under the sun, her mouth was coarse with thirst; but her mind needed a reason. She couldn’t find any clear ideas, but she raced across her fractured memory, knowing only that she had expected something more here in the emptiness, an epiphany—something beautiful and strange, some tiny kernel of truth like the slivers of quartz that formed around the impact sites of meteors or detonations. A diamond condensed out of millennia of pressure; a pearl grown from filtered poison—everything prized was the by-product of destruction; and Lydia had believed that true agony should leave something denser than these sore bones, something heavy and holy. But her father was gone, and she lay in the dust, not fifteen miles away. There was nothing in this. Pain was as common as the dirt. And as she held her own body and fell asleep, she missed her father, and said out loud, “I’m sorry, Dad.”
The night came, frost over a sunburn, and her muscles were rioting at the change. She began to sweat out her last water, passing through a brutal fever and tasting blood and salt on her lips. She closed her eyes and saw herself as a small girl, riding along the gusting air with her father, then playing in a trimmed backyard among the oleander hedges, alone beneath a hazy sky. Oleanders were poisonous, she knew—and she had been tempted to chew on them. She wasn’t sure if she had done this or not. She saw her mother sitting in a dim bedroom, watching old movies on television, still in her pajamas in the late afternoon, and for some reason this image terrified her. It’s so easy to lose everything, she whispered to herself, as she faced the sky. She was speaking to the open air, and she began to use Spanish. She said, “Ayúdame, ayúdame,” and she was speaking to Marianna, and she was nothing but a lonely little girl who was afraid of leaving another house at midnight. “Tengo sed, Marianna.”
There was a woman above her, framed by starlight.
Lydia watched the figure, a distant hallucination, but then she was startled to feel real hands, warm and damp, pressing against her face. There were men speaking in Spanish in the darkness all around her, chattering, calling over each other.
“¿Está muerta?”
“No,” said the woman above her. “Y habla español.”
Someone asked something from farther down the path, and the woman responded sternly, “No. Americana. Una gringuita.”
The woman continued petting through her hair, and someone lifted Lydia’s head and propped it up with a blanket. She felt water pushed against her lips, and she heard an argument, each voice coming from different elevations along the dark path. Lydia began to awaken, feeling the cool foreign stream of liquid down her throat. She coughed and gagged. She could tell now in the collection of shadows that they were immigrants, moving along a coyote trail between checkpoints. Some
one in the group was angry, but the others silenced him. When Lydia couldn’t hold down the water, the woman wet her fingertips and placed them in Lydia’s mouth, and she gripped them and drank the moisture like a suckling child.
“Drink,” said the woman. “Okay.”
Lydia closed her eyes in the crowd of passing legs, scraping trousers.
When she sat up, it was morning. She thought for a moment that the episode had been a dream—but beside her sat two bottles of water and a small plastic bag weighing down a map that fluttered in the wind. She took the water, drank. She cried violently. In the bag there were raisins, peanuts, and a handful of crackers. She cried and said thank you to the thin air; and she thought that it would take a solid lifetime to pay back the kindness. She drank more swallows of water, then she placed the cracker on her tongue, feeling it dissolve like a wafer.
Finally she stood and faced the horizon, and figured that anyone deserved a miracle, as long as they still had the capacity to recognize it. No, she thought, as she treaded downhill—no reward, no flash of light, no glittering epiphany: Just carry on, for the lives behind us and the lives beyond. And she felt tough and hopeful for a moment, figuring there might be only some thirty thousand paces from here to an inland sea, and each one she could imagine as a lifetime. “Straight ahead, straight ahead.” And as she walked, she nearly sang to herself over the renewed rhythm of her footsteps, “I see, I see, I see.” She repeated it until it was only a sound, evolving: “I see, sí, sí, C-77, C-77105. Calipatria. Calipatria. Calipatria.”
Lydia & Ursula
epilogue
twenty
The intercepted California DOC memorandum read as follows:
On February 16, 2001, Corrections Officers in Corcoran State Penitentiary reported the death of Jonah Pincerna, who was awaiting trial on charges of drug trafficking and murder. Pincerna had been arrested on weapons charges two months earlier in the deserts of Southeastern California, after an anonymous call about a hit-and-run accident along an unmarked ranch road. He was transferred in January from the County Facility in San Diego.
The execution-style hit on Pincerna indicated a retaliation from cartel members, possibly for an agreement to testify against his suppliers. But, weeks after the assassination, members of a prison gang were heard bragging about the murder.
Officials now believe that the murder may have been ordered by high-ranking members of the Mexican Mafia (“Eme”), possibly as part of an ongoing dispute with the AFO. A shot caller in La Eme, currently serving a life sentence at the Calipatria State Facility, was questioned in connection. He refused to cooperate.
At the bottom of the page, someone had scribbled this note:
Dear L,
It’s taken care of. Here’s more for your scrapbook. Keep your head up now, stay tough, stay clean, and don’t let me ever hear of any trouble again, or I’ll whip your ass myself. Make your old man proud. He was an ignorant redneck in a lot of ways, but in my book he was okay.
A.R.T.
Calipatria.
Ursula handed Lydia the manila envelope, across the table, as they met for lunch on the patio of a seaside restaurant. She explained that she had no idea why it had been addressed “care of Ursula Carson.” Because the opening was torn and retaped, Lydia could tell that her mother had read through the contents—an investigation report on the killings in Topanga, her father’s parole report, the Department of Corrections memorandum about Jonah’s death—but Lydia refused to explain.
Ursula said, “I was so startled to get your call, Lydia. I thought I’d never hear from you again—and I just rushed out of the house. Hardly had a chance to get ready.”
Lydia only wanted her mother to know that she was safe. She explained that she rarely came back to Southern California, but that she’d like to make it a habit of meeting now and then. All the while she spoke, she noticed how her mother was staring at her new short hair, cut into crisp shards, as if looking for an answer in Lydia’s changed appearance. Over the past six months, Lydia had gained back all of her weight. Her mother seemed to view this critically, commenting, “You look healthier than when you left.”
Lydia wouldn’t allow herself to be provoked. She told her mother that she was still angry sometimes, but that she was finding better ways to express it than tearing up houses, cutting herself or throwing tantrums. She only said that she’d had a difficult six months, but that she was recovering, learning to take care of herself, staying clean, and living up north with new plans. Her future was a tangible thing to her now. She explained to her mother that she had stopped reacting to day-to-day crises, because she had an image of herself far ahead, grown and wise. She stayed calm and worked hard in order to someday meet that mature woman.
Lydia watched a seagull perched beside the table, coveting her French fries, when her mother reached over and adjusted a strand of Lydia’s hair. “Are you cutting your own hair now?”
Lydia didn’t answer this, instead waiting for her mother to continue. She listened as Ursula talked about Chloe’s divorcing parents, and Lydia’s stepfather, who was being promoted in his firm in Century City; she described her volunteer work with an organization that was trying to stop worldwide abuse of women. Lydia nodded, listening distractedly while she watched her mother’s stiff posture and lavish hand gestures. She felt as if she’d never before looked closely at the woman. Ursula was talking as if Lydia were a stranger, pulling away further with each grandiose comment about her busy days in a house beyond those shady hills overhead, through the canyons, past the bluffs.
All at once, Lydia felt intensely lonely. She grieved for her father, and fantasized about driving down into the desert again to find the rusted scraps of his Harley. Maybe she’d put them back together and learn to ride that thing. Like this, piece by piece, maybe she’d learn to endure the quiet melancholy of her new life. Ursula kept on about the bridal shower of a woman Lydia barely knew, then how she planned to remodel her living room, until Lydia couldn’t stand the tone of the conversation: Her mother was so chipper that she seemed delusional.
As a dozen seagulls now gathered around the table, waiting for a chance to lunge ahead and raid the plates, Ursula had moved on to describe her troubles with a contractor. Whatever years of disappointment and drama in her life, they seemed to have accumulated only into this desperation to appear untouched. Lydia hurt for her, but couldn’t speak over the flow of words. Her mother’s face was youthful, so preserved that no one could have ever guessed at her struggles. She had been run down, left, beaten, and scared—and yet those memories were buried under a thick layer of gossip and plans. Lydia wanted to look down the well of her mother’s pupils and see all of those moments in which they fled together; and she wished that she could have held that terrified woman one last time.
But, as Ursula picked up a glass of Chardonnay that caught the fading light, Lydia could tell from her tight mouth and her shifting eyes that the façade was a religion now, and no amount of anger or shouting or kicking would bring it down. So Lydia reached across the table, over the bread and water and wine, and touched her mother on the corner of her mouth, slightly smudging her lipstick. Ursula flinched as if a snake had sprung at her; but Lydia softened her face and tilted her head, and said, “Mom, it’s okay. We’re going to be fine.”
As Lydia stood, scaring off the seagulls, who lifted up on the breeze and slanted off over the beach, she put her hand on her mother’s shoulder, felt it tighten, and said, “Someday you’ll know me, Mom. And I’m getting better. It’s raining every day where I live—but I’m dry. I’ve got new friends, a new place, and all my little dreams. Dad would have been happy. Because I’m no punk and I’m no pushover. Every day I wake up and say here’s another chance, kid: Here’s another chance to pay him back. I don’t need anybody to tell me who I am anymore, Mom. I’m a real tough girl nowadays.”
Lydia grabbed the check, threw a wad of small bills down for her share, then glanced up at her mother’s frightened eyes. Ursul
a seemed to think she was listening to the speech of a madwoman, and this made her glance away at the glare off the sea, to where three children were playing in the tide, throwing a stick to a dog.
“In fact,” said Lydia, squinting into the light, “I’m the toughest bitch you ever saw.”
acknowledgments
For their help, the author wishes to thank: Peternelle van Arsdale, Robert Benton, the staff at Calipatria State Prison, Catherine Crawford, Jennifer Defrancisco, Leonard in Slab City, Doug Stevenson, and Nat Sobel.
Copyright
LYDIA, THE TATTOOED LADY, By: Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg © 1939 (Renewed) EMI Feist Catalog Inc.
All Rights Reserved Used by permission
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS, U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014
Copyright © 2005 Peter Craig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.
ISBN: 97814013829162