“Well, it is and it isn’t,” she said, “when you’re trying to kill the pain.”
I thought about a well with no bottom, but I didn’t let go.
I touched Willie’s face and told her not to cry, that everything would be okay.
SIMON'S MESA
Through most of the night, through most of Arizona, I sit awake, face pressed against the cool window, feeling my feet swell. Every mile looks like every other in this light, unless my vision pulls out to the horizon. This, though, I have found to be true on any terrain, in any sense. The shorter your range of vision, the fewer options and changes to trouble you.
Near the eastern border, near the end of my bus trip, I slide into a murky sleep, and even as I drift, it teases me. Something about our trips across Arizona, Simon’s and Mrs. Hurley’s and mine. Or rather, somewhere about it.
I jump awake, a second or an hour later, the question still playing in my mind, the answer stretched before me, waiting for me to open my eyes.
The sky streaks with light, and the edge of a ball of morning fire touches the eastern corner of an endless mesa. Simon’s mesa. I try to swallow, but nothing happens. It’s the answer to my question, so I might not want it. I might need it to go away.
I know now that Simon found his way back to that mesa, unless he couldn’t. He is there or he is nowhere at all.
My legs feel hollow, my feet detached, the property of someone else entirely. If I sit frozen much longer, it will be too late. At sixty-five miles per hour, even the endless mesa will fade into history.
A heavy older woman sleeps beside me. She does not wake up when I push past her legs.
My feet scream complaints at me, which is to say they concede my ownership. I walk up the silent aisle to the driver. I speak quietly, because he and I are the only ones awake.
“I see I’m not supposed to talk to you when the bus is in motion. But this is important.” I point to Simon’s mesa, which he could hardly miss, as it forms the entire north horizon. “I need to get up there. Is there a road?”
His voice sounds gravelly, I’m guessing from coffee, cigarettes and lack of practice. “Up here three miles or so, there’s a route—I forget the number. It goes due north. I don’t suppose it takes you all the way up to that mesa, but it goes as far as any pavement goes in that direction. That’s Indian country. Navajo and Hopi reservation.”
“Then I need to get off up there.”
“Sorry,” he says, his voice oiled now with use, “no can do. I have to let you off at a regular stop.”
Right, I think, tell it to Mrs. Hurley. “What if I was causing all sorts of problems? Cussing you out, waking up the passengers. Then wouldn’t you have to put me out wherever it happened?”
He shoots me a helpless, exhausted look. “You wouldn’t do that, though, would you?”
“Not if I didn’t have to.”
I fetch my bedroll from the overhead rack. He pumps the brakes slowly, quietly, and eases the bus to a stop on the shoulder. I give a little salute as I limp away.
The sun is out of hiding, weak across Simon’s mesa but threatening big things. Telling me, wait, just wait. I’ll have my say.
I hobble along the center line of a straight ribbon of pavement, free of cars, people, animals. Free of everything but roller-coaster dips and me.
I argue with my madness. Because, you see, if it would come back now, this pain would mean nothing to me. I could walk for days. It wouldn’t matter that I’d brought no food again, or that the sun sapped my moisture and I carried no replacement. It wouldn’t even matter that I’d likely left Simon’s bleached bones a whole state behind me.
I need it badly now, the madness. Just a few days ago it came running when I called it, but now it only laughs at me. It reminds me of the years I referred to it as a stray cat and refused to feed it, knowing it would eventually move to more fertile ground. It says that if I were to ask a dog or a horse to come to me and stay, I’d have to put down proper bedding, a tub of water, a feeder, shelter. Without these basics, my guests would wither and die. But they have no choice, my madness insists, whereas it does. It tells me to have fun on my own.
On my own, every step is a torment, the sun a threat, the night which will follow it a threat. Without it I see Simon’s mesa in one direction, food and water in the other.
I ask DeeDee what to do. She says nothing. Not because she chooses not to talk, but because there is no DeeDee. Not as such. I even experiment with the possibility that she might be dead.
I sit by the side of the road, leaning back on my bedroll, gauging the distance to that horizon. Fifteen miles? A hundred?
I hear the drone of a motor, and I stick my thumb out over the roadway. I see an old International Harvester pickup truck, driven by a man with a broad, dark face. The seat beside him is stacked with birds in wire cages.
He pulls onto the shoulder, and I try to run to meet him, but I can’t run, and I’m afraid he will leave again before I can get there. He watches me in the rearview mirror, comfortable in his own patience. I scramble up onto the truck bed, and feel the tires skid on the gravel beneath me, the air move inside my clothes. I lean my head on my bedroll, watch the sky fade, not to tunnel vision, but in surrender to sleep.
THEN:
Simon accepted a dinner invitation from Virgil and his wife Ruth for two days before I was to check into the hospital for my skin grafts.
I was in a far corner of the Griffith Park Observatory, after the telescope room had technically closed to the public, staring at the astronomy charts on the walls. Maybe they thought I couldn’t hear. I listened so poorly by then, I think it was easy to fall into a habit of talking right in front of me.
“It might be a bad time for Ella,” Simon told him. “She still has to be on pain pills, and with this hospital stuff coming up—”
“Actually,” Virgil said, “that’s why I suggested it. I thought she might be worried or nervous, and the break in routine might do her good. But it’s totally up to you.”
“I’ll ask her.”
Simon asked on the drive home if I cared to go. He said Virgil lived way out in the Antelope Valley, where you can see the stars better, without all the city lights, and he had his own observatory built on next to the garage.
“Simon, does Virgil like me?”
“Of course he does, Ella. Why would you ask that?”
“Do you think his wife will like me?”
“Well, sure—what’s not to like?”
I only shrugged. I’d been noting that people backed off when I talked to them, drew their energy in like housewives pulling their children off the street. I preferred not to express this in words.
“I guess we should go, then.”
For the occasion, Simon bought me a dress. It made me nervous, though I didn’t say so. It made me feel like I should be someone different for them. I wore it without comment.
We drove out on Saturday afternoon, watching the last remnants of the city die away, the earth become bare and untouched, the way I pictured the surface of the moon. It didn’t surprise me one bit that Virgil would live out here.
“I thought this might be good for you,” Simon told me. “For us. To be around real people. You know, normal people. Do you know Virgil and his wife have been married for forty-two years? They were high school sweethearts. That’s the way you do it, Ella. Find one woman, somebody special, and just be with that one woman the rest of your life.”
Suddenly the surface of the moon felt barren and forbidding. “Is that what you’ll do, Simon?”
“Well, not right away,” he replied, as if he could talk over his awkward guilt and I, of all people, wouldn’t hear it. “Later, when you’re all grown up and you can take care of yourself. And even then, we don’t have to live far apart. We’ll live out in the country and I’ll be an astronomer.”
“Simon, can you be an astronomer without going to college?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ll have to go to college.�
��
“Later? When I’m grown up?”
“Yeah, that’s right. When you can take care of yourself.” Against great odds, and with much conscious will, I tightened my mental grip on that toothpick.
Virgil’s house was a sprawl of stucco and red tile roof on four acres of ranch land. I knew it was his, even off in the distance, by the domed roof of the observatory.
Virgil seemed looser and more natural at home. Ruth, a dark-haired woman with streaks of gray and a round face like Mrs. Santa Claus, made a great effort to show that she liked me, long before she’d seen enough of me to tell. That was a bad sign, I knew, almost as bad as deciding she didn’t like me before I had a chance to show her the truth.
She served chicken and dumplings, and homemade peach shortcake, and asked if I went to school.
“Not as often as I should. Simon has a lot of long talks with me about that.” I almost went on to tell her why, how the kids called me a loon, and made fun of me, and tripped me in the hall. But DeeDee, who stood just behind and to the left of me, kicked my chair and told me to shut up. “Sometimes I go to visit the other horses, and sometimes I walk down to the old folks’ home to see Mrs. Hurley.”
DeeDee snorted laughter. She said, yeah, but she’s never there, though. DeeDee and I had a running argument about the woman we visited. She insisted it was not Mrs. Hurley, but I felt sure it was, even though she went by a different name. That was something Mrs. Hurley would do in a mischievous moment, or after a few belts of apricot brandy.
Simon looked uncomfortable. That’s when it dawned on me, what it meant to spend time with real people. Normal people. It meant that everybody was real but me, and even my brother Simon fell on the other side of the fence, out of my reach.
I practiced silence.
After dinner Virgil showed us his observatory, and Simon helped him open out the dome. Virgil let him sift through his library and borrow any books he wanted.
He focused the telescope on the half moon, because we’d seen the moon most often in Griffith Park, and he wanted us to see the difference without the city lights.
Before I looked, I asked the most important question on my mind.
“Can DeeDee look, too?”
The room went quiet, then DeeDee broke the stillness, saying, boy, you really blew it this time.
“DeeDee?” Virgil said. I wondered if Simon had even told him who she was.
“Go on, DeeDee,” I said, because I felt guilty that she never got to look—at the city observatory there was always a line, and it wouldn’t seem right to hold it up for what might appear as a blank space.
DeeDee had bigger things on her mind. What the hell do I want to see the sky for, jerk? I’d rather watch this fight brew.
What fight? I asked her, careful not to say it out loud, because, although Simon and I never fought, he did seem concerned, and I knew I’d said more than enough already.
Look at his face, she said. You really screwed up. Boy, wait till the ride home, kid. Man, is he gonna come apart all over you.
“Shut up, DeeDee,” I said, hearing too late that I’d not only said it out loud, but far too loud.
Simon said nothing on the first half of the ride home. I’d never seen him direct and measure his silence so carefully.
Then he broke the moon-stillness, making me jump.
“You know, Ella, when DeeDee died—”
“Simon, doesn’t it seem funny to see the moon up there, and then look around and feel as though we’re driving on it?”
“Stop that, Ella. You have to listen. At first it was okay, what we did. We weren’t ready to let go yet. But we’re both older now. It’s just not a good game anymore.”
I felt a sway in my balance, and tried to jump into the conversation, as though the motion of words could set me right again. No words came out. I tried to fall back on DeeDee for balance, but she came out from under me like a throw rug on a waxy floor.
He’s right, jerk. Open your eyes. When I left, I left. Who do you think you re doing all this for, anyway?
“You know,” I said, “we should have dessert more often. Fresh dessert, like with peaches, like we had tonight. All we ever eat are sandwiches.” Simon shook his head. “Do I embarrass you, Simon?”
He didn’t answer.
He went straight to bed when we got home, no bath or anything, and I changed into my regular clothes, my jeans and comfortable sweatshirt. I tried to lie down but I was falling. Falling fast. A terrifying, thrilling sensation, the way I pictured it might feel to jump out of a plane and drop hundreds of feet per second, my stomach unable to register the shock.
I slipped out of our room and stumbled to the corner of the street, willing my vision to open out, demanding it serve me. I found the phone booth, but the path closed again, a flower in the night shadows, and I felt for the last hole on the dial, called the operator, and asked her to dial Willie’s number for me. “Hi,” I said. “It’s me, Ella. Am I calling too late?”
“No, I told you, anytime you need to call. Is anything wrong?”
“Oh, no, everything’s fine, Willie.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Fine. Except I can’t see, so I’m not sure how to walk home.”
“Where are you, Ella?”
“On the corner by my house. Right by Vermont Avenue. Just south of Griffith Park Boulevard.”
“Does Simon know where you are?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, Ella. Wait right there for me, okay?”
“Sure, Willie. Don’t hurry. I’ll be here.”
After all, where could I go? It’s not like the well had a bottom to hit, or any direction to go but down.
She picked me up and drove me to Norm’s Restaurant on Sunset and Vermont, and drank coffee and bought me a hot chocolate, and asked me to tell her what had happened.
“What makes you say something happened?”
“Okay,” she said. “Take your time.”
My line of sight opened slightly, maybe because she was there to fill it, maybe because the hot chocolate warmed it into expanding. She looked tired and blank, so ready to be what I needed that she’d forgotten to bring herself along.
“Why do you like me so much, Willie?”
She poured cream into her coffee and rubbed her eyes.
“In my job,” she said, “I talk to people day after day after day. I’ve been doing it for twenty years. Most of them never tell me what goes on inside their head. It’s like if you were an auto mechanic, and people brought their cars in for you to fix, and refused to open the hood.”
“Simon only pays seven dollars a time for me to see you. That’s not very much money for what you do.”
“Well, it works on a sliding scale, Ella. If he had more, he’d pay more. Besides, he doesn’t pay me. The county pays me. And it takes more from some and less from others.”
“Do you get paid extra for seeing me tonight?”
“No, I don’t.”
“So you really just do this because you want to?”
“What happened, Ella?”
“Nothing. Nothing happened. Really. I’m more worried about what might have happened a long time ago, that I don’t even know about yet, or what might happen later if I do too good a job of holding myself up.”
“What do you mean, holding yourself up?”
“You know, like not falling into the well.”
“What do you think will happen if you do too good a job?”
“I don’t know. Can I get another hot chocolate?”
Much as I wanted Willie to like me, to greet her with the usual open hood, I’d grown wary of becoming the sort of person who could take care of herself.
WHAT ELSE BUT SPIRIT
When I wake, the sky is still blue. Still wide. I’m still in the back of the pickup but the wheels are stationary, the engine quiet. My neck feels stiff, my hip pinched from its contact with corrugated steel.
I h
ear boot heels on wood planking. I raise my head to see that the truck is parked in front of a run-down, apparently defunct diner, and the driver who picked me up is walking out onto the front deck.
He stops at the edge of the last plank, squats down until his buttocks rest on his heels. Staring off into the distance, he begins to roll a cigarette.
His face is strong and dark, wide with years, and although it seems youthful, almost babyish, I sense the youth to be the lie in this dichotomy. His skin shows weather and wear, like saddle leather left too long in the wind and sun. He wears a deep, old scar across one eye. He is dressed much like I am. Jeans, a loose white shirt, heavy, thick-soled boots. Wide-brimmed hat. His hands are garnished with silver and turquoise, his nails bitten to the quick.
I raise up to a sit, and in doing so, catch his eye.
“This is the end of the line, I’m afraid. I didn’t see any reason to wake you.”
“Thank you for the ride,” I say, and he dips his head in a gesture of assent. I ask if I may show him a picture of a man, in case he has seen this man go by. He dips his head again, and I pull Simon’s picture from my bedroll and venture down.
The threat of the sun has been delivered. My feet are swollen with the day’s heat, and my huge boots feel too small.
He notices my limping gait but says nothing.
I sit on the deck beside him, put the photo in his hand. He smokes with the other.
I gingerly pull off my boots and socks, and he watches without comment as I peel away the bloody bandages.
“I haven’t seen this man.”
“I see. Well, thank you. If I can just take a minute to change these dressings, I’ll move along.”
“You don’t bother me by being here.”
I pull fresh gauze from a paper bag stuffed into my bedroll. He watches the process in silence.
I say, “He might have been wearing only overalls.”
“Your husband?”
“Husband? No. I have no husband.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t jump to conclusions. I thought the man in the photo was your husband.”
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