“You don’t know a thing about me,” Frances retorted.
The painter shook his head, bemused, and faced front. Frances kept waiting for him to turn back—he’d spoken to her first, after all—and once she nearly said something, but he bundled his jacket for a pillow and fell asleep against the window.
For the rest of the ride Frances went over the interaction, and she didn’t forget her pique until they entered Santa Fe. As they approached downtown, the traffic thickened and tangled; at every street, it seemed, they stopped for crowds of happy pedestrians to cross. The passengers watched from the windows, and laughter and shouts rose above the rumble of the vehicles. Frances’s spirits soared.
When they pulled up in front of the bus depot on Water Street, the painter stood before they’d even stopped and reached for his canvas bag. Then he leaned over her and squinted out Frances’s window, as if scanning the crowded sidewalk for the person who’d come to pick him up. Frances braced herself for the smell of his breath, and then it came. “Little whore,” he said in her ear, so softly she wondered if she’d imagined it, and before she’d even lifted her gaze to him, he was moving quickly down the aisle, stepping off the bus.
Frances flushed and for what felt like a long time couldn’t move. Had anyone heard? But they were all disembarking now, straightening hats and shirt collars. Up at the front of the bus, her father was shaking hands and tipping his hat, helping the woman with the crochet down the steps.
Frances took a deep breath to compose herself. That painter was nothing, no one. He probably wasn’t even a painter. She could see him on the sidewalk. He’d bought a paper from the newsstand by the depot and was paging through it. Go away, go away, go away, thought Frances. She would not budge from this bus until he’d disappeared down the street.
Heart pounding, she arranged her purse and her swimming bag on her shoulders, straightened her cardigan.
“Enjoy the Fiestas,” said the thin woman, setting her hat back on her head.
It was then that Frances noticed he’d left his lunch sack on his seat. Suddenly she was filled with rage at this man who’d had the gall to speak to her in the first place, to tell her to smile and then to insult her when she did. She would step off the bus, call to him, smiling and sunny—“Sir, your lunch!”—wave the paper sack over her head, make as if to hand it to him. And then, when he reached for it—shamed by her kindness—Frances would open her hand, drop it in the street, and grind his sandwich under her heel.
She leaned over the seat, snatched the sack. She was so angry she was trembling.
When Frances looked inside, there was no sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, no apple or jelly jar of milk, no food at all. Inside the bag was a fat stack of bills.
She walked stiffly down the aisle and submitted to her father’s kiss goodbye. She flushed, hot and ashamed, as if her father somehow knew what she’d done, knew what the painter had called her.
“Be safe, Francy. Be good.” He pulled her in for an extra hug, and Frances, with the paper sack stuffed in her purse, responded, “Of course.”
Then Frances was down the bus steps and into the arms of Nancy and Aunt Lillian, who shrieked and clung and jabbered at her. They each took an arm and waved gaily with their free hands as her father’s bus pulled into the Water Street traffic, then dragged her along the crowded sidewalk between them. “The Plaza’s already full!” cried Nancy. “I thought you’d never get here.”
“She’s been beside herself all day,” said Aunt Lillian. Behind her, the painter was still reading the paper. Every once in a while he scanned the street.
“Wait,” said Frances, stopping. “I’d like to drop my things at your house.”
“We can’t go home!” said Nancy. “Everything’s already started. Plus, I’m starving. The Elks Club is selling hot dogs and Frito pies!”
Frances felt she was walking strangely. Her purse was barely heavier, but it had tipped her off-balance and her gait was self-conscious and labored. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
The bus depot restroom was vile, the floor wet around the toilet and dirty with footprints. Ordinarily, Frances would have hovered over a toilet like this, and even then only in an emergency. Today, though, she sat right down.
One hundred and forty dollars. An enormous amount of money, all in ones and fives and tens. Nearly what her father was paid every two weeks, more than she could hope to make in a year of babysitting. Enough to fund her escape.
Strange that he should keep it in a paper sack. Perhaps he’d just sold a painting or had intended to buy something, something illicit that required a discreet handoff. Drugs, stolen goods. She wondered if the painter was still outside, waiting to twist her arm and throw her onto the sidewalk and wrench her purse away.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door, and Frances sat still. The person knocked again. If she were the kind of girl to cry, she might now. But why? She’d had a tremendous stroke of luck. She was glad she had the money, glad she’d taken it. She needed it. He owed it to her, calling her what he had.
Frances smoothed the bills and slipped them into her wallet. But the stack was too fat and the wallet wouldn’t close. Also, she’d be a draw for criminals with that kind of cash spilling out. So she removed all but twenty dollars, folded the rest of the money back into the sack and stuffed it into the bottom of her swimming bag.
The thought—the foolish, embarrassing thought—crossed her mind that maybe the man was an angel, but that was idiotic, something her mother would say. Frances was now pretty certain the man wasn’t even a painter. His nails were one clue. And if he were a painter, what would he be doing in Wagon Mound? No one lived in Wagon Mound. And no one kept money in paper bags. More likely the man was a grifter who’d come to Santa Fe to spend his ill-gotten gains and cheat others. Unless he really was just a hardworking ranch hand and Frances was now holding his entire life’s savings. But no: if there’s one thing she knew, it was that even before he’d opened his mouth, there’d been something sleazy about the man, something underhanded and insinuating.
When Frances emerged from the depot into the sunlight, the painter was gone. She smiled at Nancy and Aunt Lillian, slung her purse over one shoulder, swimming bag over the other. “I’m starving,” she said.
THE PLAZA WAS SWARMED with people and packed with booths, everything buzzing and festive. Banners rippled in the hot breeze, and the grass was sun-dappled through the tall cottonwoods. The costumes! There, drinking a Coke on the bleachers was the Fiesta Queen in her frothy white lace, her mantilla and high comb, surrounded by her court. And there, Don Diego de Vargas with his crested helmet and cape. Conquistadors and Mexicans and bandidos, Indians, nuns, cowboys. Fringed vests and enormous sombreros, Spanish shawls and elaborate headdresses. Several people wore lush Navajo velvet, big blouses for the men, long skirts for the women. Frances most admired the fiesta dresses, though, silver-trimmed gauzy cotton the color of ice cream: pink, turquoise, green, yellow. She would buy one herself, she decided.
A large white-haired man came up behind Aunt Lillian and lifted her off her feet. “George!” she cried, and he kissed her on the mouth. When he set her down, Aunt Lillian patted her updo, and Frances thought of her mother’s verdict: featherbrained.
Aunt Lillian’s friend George was a cowboy, complete with leather chaps and lasso. “In real life I’m a banker.” He pulled his card from his pocket and gave it to Frances. Then, back in character, he roped Nancy and pulled her to him. “Git along little dogie.”
“Get off!” Nancy yelled. She wriggled free of the rope and threw it back at him, then yanked Frances away and marched her across the crowded grass. Behind them Aunt Lillian laughed.
“I hate him,” Nancy said. “He’s always ogling me.”
Well, of course he was, Frances thought. Everyone was always ogling Nancy, and Nancy intended that they should. Look at her today, for instance. Her soft light hair, low-cut dress, silver rickrack glinting in the sun, the long strand of turquoise beads c
aught in her cleavage. So like Nancy to make herself look that way and then complain when people noticed. Frances squared her shoulders and touched her own hair; her curls had fallen completely. So what? If she cared about those things, she’d get her hair done professionally at the beauty shop. She could afford it.
As they walked the periphery of the Plaza, Frances looked in every window for a valise. No luck. The money stuffed in her bag seemed such an obvious presence, banging at her side. It marked her, and Frances couldn’t believe people weren’t staring. It would almost be a relief to spend it, to transform it into clothes her size, items that reflected who she was. But it wasn’t to be spent, not yet, anyway. She pictured herself at college, opening a new notebook in the hum of a full lecture hall.
“Banker,” spat Nancy. “Ha. Works in a bank, more like. He’s a creep. I really don’t know what she sees in him.”
Frances shrugged. “Well, she’s always been a little man crazy.”
She paused to look in the plate-glass window of the Trading Post. Several kids about eleven or twelve also clustered on the sidewalk, peering in. There, surrounded by tooled-leather saddles and woven blankets, a Navajo girl in traditional velvet skirts stood stock-still, an enormous silver belt in her frozen outstretched hands.
“She is real,” insisted a boy. “She blinked. There!”
The Navajo girl was remarkably good, stone-faced and flat-eyed.
The kids started banging the glass. “There! She did it again!” A few made faces and wagged their tongues.
“She’s probably going to marry him,” said Nancy bleakly. “I’ll probably have to live in the same damn house with him.”
At the Elks’ booth, they ordered cold Cokes and Frito pies. Frances rifled through the bills in her wallet, but Nancy wasn’t even paying attention.
“My treat,” said Frances.
Nancy shrugged. “I won’t say no.”
They ate sitting on the back of a park bench, feet on the seat. It felt good to put down her swimming bag. Her dress was dark with sweat where the strap had pressed against her.
“God, it’s hot,” said Frances. She couldn’t stand it a minute longer. She took off her cardigan and clamped her armpit shut.
“I know.” Nancy licked chile from the heel of her hand. “What’re you doing wearing a sweater, anyway?”
“I met someone on the bus,” Frances said. “A painter. And not like your friend Sally’s painter with the dog food. This guy is famous. He has shows in Paris and London, all over.”
“So?” said Nancy, still sulking.
“So? So he’s rich.” Frances couldn’t have been more indignant if she’d been telling the truth. “And he asked me to dine with him tonight.”
“To dine? What is he, an aristocrat?” But Nancy was looking Frances up and down, impressed.
“Of course I told him I couldn’t. He must be nearly thirty. Still, it’s never fun disappointing someone like that.”
“Nancy!” somebody called, and Nancy brightened. Suddenly they were flanked by boys. They introduced themselves politely to Frances, and one even asked what Raton was like, but soon they turned back to her cousin. They jostled each other and joked about people Frances didn’t know, and Nancy sat glowing in their midst.
For a while Frances made a point of smiling and nodding along, but that got old, and no one was looking at her anyway. She felt unbearably dull. Two of the boys started slapping at each other, and one boy put the other in a headlock, all for the benefit of Nancy. What was it about boys? Frances thought angrily. Couldn’t they keep still for a minute?
“So? Isn’t Mike a doll?” Nancy asked when they’d gone.
Frances put her hand on her cousin’s arm. “Just be careful, okay? I’d hate to see you getting into trouble.”
Nancy snorted. “You should talk, with your middle-aged painter. Anyway, you have a hole in your armpit.”
“BURN HIM! BURN HIM! BURN HIM!” The crowd was chanting, and Frances chanted along, but self-consciously. Her own voice seemed flattened, droning in her ear.
It was night at Fort Marcy Park, and the baseball field was crowded with cars and trucks, spread blankets, abandoned picnics. Zozobra, the looming white marionette, bellowed as the flames climbed his gown. His face, with its scowling eyes and gaping mouth, flickered orange against the black sky; when he swayed, sparks rained down over the crowd. Above, fireworks whistled and exploded.
Nancy had Frances by the wrist and was dragging her through the press of people at the barricade. Here the bonfire’s heat was a solid, smothering presence, pulsing under her skin like a sunburn. The sweaty seams of her dress were tight and chafing. Frances held tight to her purse and her swimming bag.
“They said they’d be here!” called Nancy. “Would you hurry?” She was looking for her friends, the boys from the Plaza among them, but Frances couldn’t imagine how they’d ever find anyone in this mass of people. The air was weighted with the smell of gunpowder and sweat and toxic, chemical smoke.
Zozobra bawled, arms flailing uselessly, body rooted in the flames. The people’s excitement seemed sadistic, medieval. Frances had a sudden vision of the painter stepping from the flames like Satan to collect his due, and the thought made her sweat still more.
“Can’t we just watch from back there?” asked Frances, but Nancy didn’t hear her over Zozobra’s moans.
When the flames reached Zozobra’s face, the crowd cheered. His head was stuffed with paper, records of divorce proceedings and legal wrangling and failed exams and paid-off mortgage documents. And now all those troubles were being burned away. It seemed these people really felt released, but Frances kept glancing all about, her shoulders aching under the strap of her bag. Zozobra thrashed and wailed in anguish, shaking off flaming paper that drifted around him.
In no time at all, Zozobra collapsed with a cascade of sparks, gloom defeated once again, and the cheer of “Viva la Fiesta!” rose from the crowd. You could already hear the music from the Plaza, rousing and joyful. Everyone streamed through the streets to join it.
The crowd in the Plaza was even louder and denser than in the park, people spinning and writhing to the mariachi band playing from the lit bandstand. The dark crush was thrilling and terrifying, unlike anything Frances had ever experienced. Nancy whirled, laughing, sipped from an open bottle of beer handed to her. She handed it to Frances, and no sooner had Frances taken a sip than another bottle was passed to her.
They hadn’t found Nancy’s friends, but it hardly mattered; everyone was friends on the Plaza. The gaiety swirled about them, but though Frances tried, she simply couldn’t find her way into it. She danced and laughed, but her rhythm was off, her voice false and harsh. She gulped the beer until she felt the disembodied sensation of drunkenness, but the feeling only made her less a part of the crowd, untouchable and remote.
She tried to spin a story about one of the boys from earlier—the one in the leather vest, say—who couldn’t get her out of his mind, who’d been looking for her all night, waiting to lift her chin, but the scenario was hollow and unsatisfying.
Maybe if Frances had a costume she’d be feeling it all more. She wished she had a Spanish shawl, black embroidered with red and gold chrysanthemums. She wished she could buy something—anything—now. What a joke, to have all this money in the middle of Santa Fe and nowhere to spend it. Mostly, Frances wanted to put her bag down. But it was still strapped to her, cumbersome, banging into everyone every time she moved.
Next to her a fight broke out, two sweaty men lunging at each other, their teeth bared, their rage clumsy and grunting. Frances gaped, but Nancy just rolled her eyes and pushed her deeper into the crowd.
By one in the morning, the bands had changed. Drunk men commanded Frances to dance! Dance! “Why so gloomy?” one asked and flicked her nose.
Nancy’s dress had slipped off her shoulder, exposing a dingy bra strap. She weaved among the men, pinching one on the bottom. He retaliated by squeezing her breast. Another reached f
or Frances’s breast, but she batted his hand away.
“S’okay,” he said. “Not much there anyway.”
Those men, their hands were everywhere, and Nancy couldn’t stop laughing. Laughing with abandon, Frances thought. She was so envious it hurt.
Someone grabbed her upper arm and spun her around. “If it isn’t Smarty-Pants.”
The painter. Frances gasped. But he didn’t strike her and he didn’t throw her to the ground to be crushed. He was dancing, feet stomping, fingers snapping. “Enjoying yourself, I see.”
He was drunk, unfocused in the eyes, slack around the mouth. His shirt was unbuttoned, his bolo tie gone. At his sweat-glazed temples, his hair was curling. Frances’s hand tightened on the strap of her bag.
“And you?” she shouted over the noise. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“More now.” He swigged from his bottle, held it aloft. “To the kindness of strangers.”
Could he know? He couldn’t possibly. All those people on and off a bus; any number of people could have taken the sack. It might have remained on the bus, to be discovered by someone in Las Vegas or Watrous or Springer. Her father might have picked it up during a trash sweep, and, knowing him, thrown it away without looking inside. The fact was that Frances would have overlooked the sack if she hadn’t been so angry. Little whore. But angry wasn’t quite the word. She was shocked, yes. Hurt. Embarrassed.
And also—strangely—released. She stood a little straighter and swung her bag by the strap, and for the first time in hours her smile didn’t feel forced. All around her people were fighting and kissing and dancing wildly. The music soared and slipped under her skin. Her feet found the beat.
Perhaps the painter had left the money for Frances intentionally. Perhaps he’d known she’d see the bag; it was a test, and by taking the money, she was admitting she was what he’d called her. In taking it she’d sullied herself, and he knew it and was laughing at her.
If that was the case, if he’d spent the whole night looking for her, this was a game she could play. She took his sweaty hand and danced toward him, swaying her hips, her purse and bag knocking against her.
Night at the Fiestas: Stories Page 9