by Tim O'Brien
***
Amy Robinson passed the flask to Jan Huebner. "One thing in Karen's favor," Amy whispered. "Lucky girl doesn't have to listen to eulogies."
"Or have to pee," said Jan.
"Or cry," said Amy.
"Exactly," Jan said. "And no more reunions."
17. NOGALES
KAREN BURNS is fifty-one, single, sturdy, a graying redhead, bashful with men, undistinguished of face and figure. She directs a retirement community in Tucson, and today, full of hope, she leads several of her charges on a walking tour of a desert park just outside the city. They have arrived by van: Karen, five residents of Homewood Estates, and a driver named Darrell Jettie. Single file, they plod down a marked cinder trail, past wildflowers and dwarf pinons and twisted old saguaros. The day is a scorcher, but the group moves along dutifully, the men chatting about golf, the women dabbing at their foreheads as Karen reads aloud from a park brochure.
Karen is not dressed for a desert outing. She is dressed for Darrell Jettie—in black slacks, gold sandals, a black cotton blouse. Black slims her down.
For six weeks, since hiring Darrell as a part-time driver, Karen has entertained robust, minutely detailed romantic fantasies. She cannot help herself. Even now, under the desert sun, her head is cluttered with voices not quite familiar. She imagines Darrell Jettie's tongue in her mouth. She imagines preparing his breakfast, honeymooning on an exotic island.
Maybe love, someone, or something, whispers to her. He wants you. He's watching.
Karen blushes.
Still reading aloud from the brochure, she tells herself to take ten more steps, then stop, then look back at him and smile. Instantly, however, she revises this thought. Twenty-five steps, she decides. Fifty for sure.
And then she counts to herself.
At fifty, she stops and turns, bravely, but can manage only a weak stare.
Darrell frowns. He takes a half step.
"Problem?" he says.
Karen's heart clenches up. She shakes her head, spins around, and strides down the cinder trail.
At noon, when the group returns to the air-conditioned van, Karen sits in front next to Darrell, who is thirty-six, blond, excessively polite, a chain smoker. Karen has been dreaming love dreams all morning.
"Back to the ranch?" says Darrell.
"Oh, naturally, the ranch," Karen says, and tells herself not to hope.
Darrell pulls onto the highway.
He drives fast, smoking, two slender fingers hooked over the wheel. Though she does not smoke, and hates the smell, Karen has a sudden craving to put his cigarette to her lips. She almost reaches out. Do it, a voice urges, but she folds her hands and stares at the road.
They return to Homewood Estates in time for lunch. Karen checks in at her office and then hurries to the dining room, where she takes a seat at Darrell's table. It is no surprise to find him testing his charms on Bess Hollander, a balding, partly deaf eighty-year-old. Darrell flirts with a luxurious, practiced, nightclub voice, and with a boyish slant to his lips, but mostly with his eyes, which are pale blue and untroubled.
"Go down through Nogales," he's telling Bess. He speaks loudly, each syllable seductive. "Cross over there, head for the good times. A day trip. Kick up our heels."
Bess is enchanted. "We'll just see about that," she says. "Don't count chickens, buster. It's not like I'm a two-bit floozy."
"You are so," says Darrell. "You're a harlot."
Bess laughs at this. Her husband—Ed Hollander, age seventy-six—grunts and says, "Count me in. You chase Bess, I'll chase señoritas."
"Fair enough," says Darrell. He turns to Karen. "Ready for an adventure?"
"Adventure?"
"We're taking the van to Mexico."
A roller-coaster feel comes into Karen's stomach. "Are we?" she says.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, then," Karen says.
It crosses her mind that Darrell has been hired as a driver, not as a tour leader, and that he ought to have cleared this with her. But she has already nodded. And Darrell has already reached across the table and gripped her wrist and said, "Tomorrow morning, first thing. Wear something sexy."
A silly crush: Karen understands that. Even so, in her apartment that evening she tries on a number of outfits in preparation for Mexico, posing before a hallway mirror, settling on a navy-blue skirt and a simple gray blouse. It may be true, Karen realizes, that she is pursuing a pipe dream. But it is certainly true, beyond question, that since childhood she has had trouble separating the world of fantasy from the world of human experience. Voices, for example. They come and go, most often male voices: a lifeguard at summer camp, a sociology professor, a gynecologist who paid nightly visits to her dreams. In each case she had dropped hints, then later worked up the courage to make overtures. The rejections had been curt and crushing. Twice she had ended up in hospitals.
But it's different this time. "Wear something sexy," Darrell had said. The words were real, no delusion, and Karen chooses her underclothing carefully, with an eye for what might appeal to Darrell's taste.
She puts on a black bra and black panties. She frowns at herself in the mirror.
Maybe love, she thinks.
Later, she slips into bed with the thought that Nogales has a reputation for excess, and that excess is something she has been craving since she was a girl.
They head south on U.S. 19, Darrell Jettie at the wheel, Karen beside him, four elderly residents of Homewood Estates conversing in the rear seats. The discussion is loud and lurching. Elaine Wirtz, age seventy-nine, defends the claim that she was a jaguar in an earlier life. She knows this, Elaine says, the way she knows she ate a bagel for breakfast that morning. Bess Hollander squints and cups an ear. "She was what?"
"A bagel," Norma Ickles says.
"A what?"
Two rows back, Ed Hollander yells, "A goddamn Jaguar! One of them rich-man cars."
"She ate a car?" says Bess.
"She was a car," says Norma.
"Not a car," says Elaine Wirtz. "I was a jaguar. A cat. Like a puma."
"Well, for chrissake!" Ed yells.
"What's a puma?" says Bess.
Darrell's eyes sweep sideways. He grins at Karen.
They cross the border at Nogales.
Darrell bypasses the center of town, cruises down a series of streets lined with chollas and barbed wire and forlorn adobe shacks. After ten minutes he turns onto a two-lane highway that winds back into the Sonoran Desert.
Karen asks where he is taking them.
"The real Mexico," says Darrell.
"Well, that's fine. But what about... What happened to Nogales?"
He laughs. "Cheap booze, cheap women. Who needs it? I promised an adventure, didn't I?"
"I think you did."
"All right, then," he says, and flashes her a polished grin. "Take it easy. Let that pretty hair down."
Twenty minutes later Darrell pulls in at a truck stop. The day is desert-hot and dry. They troop inside, order coffee, sit around a table discussing the day. No one seems perplexed by the absence of any clear destination, or by the fact that they are well beyond the world of turquoise bracelets and straw sombreros. Bess and Elaine and Norma review their shopping plans. Ed talks about finding a bullfight. "Bloody beef," he says slyly, knowing this will cause controversy. Elaine glares and says, "No bullfights. Molesting animals, that's all it amounts to."
"Because she used to be one," Norma says.
"A puma," says Bess.
"I was not, not, not!" Elaine says.
Karen threatens to turn back to Tucson. But as she speaks, as she says "Turn," she detects movement against her knee. Darrell smiles at her. His hand has slipped beneath her navy-blue skirt; it glides upward a few inches, stops at midthigh. Karen freezes. By reflex, she repeats herself. "Turn back," she says, but without conviction, and Darrell laughs and says, "Hey, we're having a ball, aren't we?"
His hand remains on her thigh, confident. His smile, too
, is confident, very mild and well mannered. "Let's finish our coffee, folks, then hit the road. Don't forget that big adventure we were talking about."
His hand goes to her black panties, goes inside.
Karen cannot wholly comprehend what is happening. She's giddy. She's terrified. She has not been touched this way since the night of her sixteenth birthday.
***
For almost an hour Darrell drives straight south, through rugged, repetitive desert, then he turns onto a gravel road that wanders past abandoned houses and vast tracts of sagebrush. Off to the left, both close and far away, is a range of purply black mountains. There are no towns. There are no road signs or people. They have not passed another vehicle in many miles, nor a single living creature, but Karen isn't thinking about this. She's thinking about the truck stop and the feel of Darrell's hand beneath her skirt. The terror is gone now. She wishes he'd do it again.
She fusses with her hair, listening to the hum of the air conditioner, trying to dredge up something worth saying to him: a hint that under the right circumstances she would be prepared to accept his touch again. If it were possible, if she were another woman, she'd find a way to let him know how savage she is, how female, how she would claw and wrap herself around him and keep him prisoner forever, make him feel everything she felt, make him crazy with desire and hurt.
In the back seats, Norma Ickles and Ed Hollander argue about the meaning of the word "mesa." Neither has trouble saying the most idiotic things, which gives Karen the courage to clear her throat. She will count to seven, she decides, and then speak.
She counts to fifty, starts over, then says, "Darrell, you're an excellent driver."
His forehead wrinkles. He seems bewildered, or apprehensive, but he nods and says, "Well, sure, I've had experience. Six, seven times I drove clean across country." He grins at this. "Guess I like to watch the miles go by. Like to roam."
"Roam?" she says.
"Anywhere. Everywhere."
"Well, you drive perfectly," says Karen, "and I mean that."
She can think of nothing else to say, her head as empty as the desert, but Darrell seems not to notice. He is deep in thought. Maybe he's forgotten that not an hour ago his hand had slipped beneath her skirt, inside her black panties.
"Driving's a tricky thing," he tells her. "Especially the cross-country hauls. Like Zen, sort of. Main thing to remember, you don't fight the road, you don't worry about every dip and curve, you just keep your eyes pointed way up ahead. Go with the flow." He flicks a cool smile in her direction. "Like sex, I guess. Enjoy the ride, kick back, let the road drive you."
"Interesting," Karen says. She has no idea what he means. "So where does the road take us?"
"Ma'am?"
"Where does it go? This road."
Darrell tosses his shoulders. Slowly, as if his tongue has gone heavy, he says, "Exactly where it wants."
"I meant—"
"A shortcut," he says. "Ten or fifteen more miles, we're there."
Then again, for no obvious reason, he shrugs. With one hand he opens a fresh pack of cigarettes. He glances into the rearview mirror, frowns, taps out a smoke, lights it, and says, "I don't plan to hurt anybody."
Karen isn't sure she heard correctly. "I don't understand."
"Nothing to understand."
"You said hurt."
He turns up the air conditioning. "Real nice of you to hire me, ma'am. Hell or high water, I'm grateful for that."
In the back seats, Bess and Elaine and Norma are commenting on the desert scenery unfolding before them, how untamed it is, how unspoiled. For a few moments Karen listens to their chitchat.
"Hurt how?" she says.
Darrell pats her forearm as if she were a child. "Men, I mean. From what I can tell, you don't have a whole lot of experience."
Karen nods. She is conscious of her black underwear.
"I suppose that's right."
"Can't mess with virgins. Wouldn't be civil."
"But what if..." She loses her breath, begins again. An angry snarl goes through her thoughts. "What if it doesn't matter to me?"
"Doesn't matter?"
"Experience with men. I can imagine, can't I?"
Darrell laughs.
"Apparently so," he says.
The road becomes dirt. After twenty minutes it ends entirely. In all directions there is wilderness.
They bump along for another two hundred yards before Darrell pulls up alongside an old red pickup truck. For a few seconds it appears the truck is empty, then the passenger-side door swings open and a young man in coveralls and a white baseball cap emerges. His face is sunburnt, his left cheek discolored by a birthmark. He strolls to the van, leans forward to speak with Darrell. The young man looks to be in his mid-twenties. He is slim and blue-eyed, and except for the birthmark he could pass for Darrell's twin brother.
Darrell opens his door, gets out, follows the young man over to the red pickup.
In the back seat, Bess says, "What's this?"
"Not good," says Ed.
They sit now in the bed of the truck: Karen, Bess, Ed, Norma, and Elaine. It's early afternoon. Darrell and the young man have removed portions of the van's floor carpeting, and Darrell bends down with a screwdriver, muttering, his expression intent. Karen is baffled by this. Now and then the birthmarked young man seems to offer suggestions, which Darrell ignores. Plainly, both of them are agitated. At one point Darrell's screwdriver slips, and he jerks back and utters a pair of shocking mismatched nouns.
Elaine Wirtz lets out a noise from her lungs. She glares at Karen. "You hired this monster."
"Very polite, though," says Norma Ickles.
"Baloney," Elaine snaps. "Don't you get it? They intend to murder us."
Bess leans forward and says, "They what?"
"Murder!" Elaine yells.
"Jesus Christ," Ed says.
Karen is perplexed, barely listening. She watches Darrell go back to work with his screwdriver. He's on the floor of the van, directly behind the driver's seat, and Karen cannot help noticing that his shirt has slipped up to expose a flat, tanned belly. She is afraid, but she is also spellbound. He reminds her of a boy she'd adored back in high school—a boy who used to smile at her in the cafeteria, who once drew graphic, exhilarating pictures in a book she'd dropped, but who in the end was too shy to respond to the many, many love letters she had placed in his locker. That early affair of the heart had gone nowhere. It was sterile and one-sided; the boy had almost suffocated her in the back seat of a car on the night of her sixteenth birthday, almost broken her in half, and then dropped her off at a Dairy Queen and stared at the steering wheel and asked if she'd mind walking home. But now, for a moment, Karen finds herself contemplating a happy ending. Darrell will soon say there's nothing to worry about, that he wishes to marry her and peel off her underwear and do all the bestial things she has read about in magazines, back-seat things, those things she so desperately wants, but also doesn't want, or only on her wedding night, only on a remote island with soft winds and flower smells.
Karen knows better, yet the knowledge doesn't puncture hope.
Despite herself, she feels an expectant tremor when Darrell slides out of the van. He tucks in his shirt, speaks briefly with his friend, and then the two of them stroll toward the pickup.
Elaine Wirtz stiffens. She nudges Bess and says, "Murder time."
"Do something," says Norma.
"Me?" Elaine says. "I'm seventy-nine."
They glance over at Ed, who makes a hapless movement with his head. He tells them to quiet down.
"You're the man" says Norma.
"Old man," he says. "And not stupid."
"Well, personally," says Bess, "I'm thirsty. Not to mention you know what." She pauses dramatically, lifts her eyebrows. "I'm a lady. I need conveniences."
Even now Karen cannot purge herself of hope. She looks for a sign from Darrell. A smile, maybe, or a bashful bit of eye contact. But instead he leans down and removes
six green shoe boxes from a compartment in the floor of the pickup. He passes the boxes to his friend, who carries them to the van.
Elaine Wirtz gets to her feet and says, "Don't kill me."
Darrell grins. "Easy now."
"No, I just want ... What's happening here?"
"Smuggling, I'd guess," Ed says.
"Smuggling?" says Bess. "Smuggling shoes?"
"Drugs," Ed says. "Ten to one—drugs."
Darrell stands in the desert sunlight, the corners of his lips seeming to teeter on the edge of a smile. When he looks at Karen, there is an apology in his eyes. Something else, too. A kind of longing: she's sure of it.
As if to confirm this, Darrell shifts from foot to foot. He can't hold her gaze.
"Twenty more minutes," he says graciously, "then we'll pile in the van and have ourselves a nice happy ride back to the border. Cross over, home free."
Elaine snaps out a mocking laugh. "Except you've forgotten the murder part."
"Sorry, ma'am. No murders."
"What a liar."
"No," Ed says. "Bastard needs us, don't you see? Bunch of old codgers. Makes it easy at customs." He peers at Darrell. "Am I right? Right I'm right."
"Yes, sir. Just so everybody behaves."
Once again Darrell's chivalrous eyes brush across the surface of Karen's face.
She straightens up.
Inappropriate, of course, but she's struck by an urge to tell him about the aftertaste of a Dairy Queen cone on the night of her sixteenth birthday.
Darrell is at the wheel again, Karen beside him, Darrell's friend sitting in back with the others.
As they approach Nogales, Darrell turns off the radio.
"Attention, all hands," he says. He slows down, smiles at Karen. "Listen up good. When we hit the border, I want this whole crew to act super-duper normal. No nonsense, no funny faces." He chuckles. His voice is courteous and uninflected. "Hands in your laps, pretend it's church. Anybody asks questions, we're a gang of tourists."