All I Have in This World (11 page)

Standing in the car lot, the woman's question hovering unanswered in the space between them, Marcus remembered once having seen a man in a salvage yard where he had gone to buy a fuel pump for a tractor. The keeper of the salvage yard was mute, wiry, stingy with his gestures. He made Marcus wait while he stuck his head under the hood of a car, told a boy in the driver's seat to hit the gas, and listened to the engine rev as if contemplating an aria. Then he disappeared into a shed and emerged in seconds holding a lone socket wrench so resolutely the right choice that it appeared to be an extension of his hand.

The tool for the job, the names of things, the aloof cool of the present-tense drifter—what was it about the question that struck Marcus with the sudden want of all of the above, and at once? Nothing abstract or ambiguous about it. A yes was required, or a no.

What sort of place was this, anyway? A lithe and lovely woman, blown up from nowhere, had just asked him to test-drive a car for her. It happened to be the car he wanted for himself. Where, in America, could you not walk into a used-car lot and purchase without impediment what looked to Marcus to be at least a twenty-year-old Buick?

So open was this place, so wide its sky, so looming were the craggy bluffs above town, so insanely tinted were they by light the likes of which he'd seen only in coffee-table photography books—more shades of brown, reddish brown, yellowish brown, blondish brown, greenish brown, than he'd ever thought possible—that Marcus worried his ability to reason was overwhelmed.

Prudence was called for. He must keep from her, at least for now, their mutual desire.

“Will I
what
?” he said, in a way that suggested he had not heard her correctly as much as that he didn't understand.

“Well, see,” she said, “I don't really know anything about cars.” She went on to explain that she had never owned one, that she had always been able to get by without one, but that now she needed a car because she had just started a new business.

“Even I know enough to know that you ought not to buy a car before you drive it,” she said.

“So you think there might be something wrong with it?” said Marcus.

His question put her on the defensive. “No,” she said. “I didn't say that. But if you're suggesting I should just go ask the guy whether there is anything wrong with the car, I mean . . .”

“I understand,” said Marcus, when she failed to finish her sentence. “I wouldn't recommend you do that.”

“Not that he's not an honest man,” she said.

“Right,” said Marcus. “So you need someone who's more objective?”

“Impartial,” she said, as if she were correcting him. As if “objective” did not in this case imply “impartial.” Still, her word rankled. So she assumed he was impartial when she came upon him studying the same car? Did she think he was out for a stroll? Was she arrogant or just oblivious? People sometimes found him arrogant, Rebecca told him once, and when he asked why—because he was truly shocked by this, he always thought he came across as modest and accessible—she said it was because he often seemed “unto himself.” He had no idea what that meant—it did not sound bad to him or even noteworthy, for isn't everyone finally “unto themselves”?—but he decided that she meant oblivious.

Maybe arrogance always contained a dose of oblivion. He had about decided that the woman was equally both when he noticed that her expression was so pained, and she seemed so depleted, that she was obviously embarrassed. Marcus felt a little bad for her, and a little guilty for deceiving her, but only for a minute.

“Sure,” he said. “I've owned a few cars in my time. I'll be happy to take it for a spin and tell you what I think.”

The beginning of a lie is so sweetly delicious, for it seems not yet a lie but just a hidden desire, a secret rightfully kept. Though secrets can turn toxic, can thwart careers, ruin marriages, topple countries, there is such power in their incipient stage that the word
secret
is not yet applicable. For it is mostly just yearning; it has not yet taken the elevator up to the brain; it hovers somewhere between the heart and the groin.

Marcus was about to ask if he should go fetch the key when the salesman who earlier had come out of his tiny office to size Marcus up and within seconds had obviously deemed him not worth leaving the comfort of his air-conditioning for came loping through the lot.

“Find something to love?” he said to the woman.

“This one,” she said, pointing to the Buick between them, which elicited from the salesman such a hackneyed history—previous owner was an elderly lady, rancher's widow who'd moved into town after he died, hardly ever drove it, church, beauty parlor, grocery store, kept it serviced regularly, clean as a whistle—that despite its familiarity was delivered so passionately that it brought to Marcus's mind (even though he was sure it was a lie) a hunched-over grandma backing the car slowly down a driveway once or twice a week, on the seat beside her a shiny black patent-leather purse containing in a side pocket a folded plastic rain bonnet to protect her helmet of purplish hair.

“We'd like to test-drive it,” said the woman when he was done. Marcus had looked at her once during the salesman's spiel and deduced from her frozen smile that she was not paying a bit of attention.

“We?” Only then did the salesman take note of him. Was Marcus, because he wasn't native, invisible? She'd not seemed to notice him, either, for a few minutes. “Oh, how you doing?” the salesman said to Marcus, and then he turned back to the woman. “I didn't realize y'all were together, your mama didn't mention . . .”

“No problem,” said the woman, in a way that was sharp but not rude and that shut Mr. Fantastic Deals up and sent him off to fetch the key.

When he was gone, Marcus said his name was Marcus. She said her name was Maria. After which, silence. No “Nice to meet you,” no “Thank you for pretending to be my acquaintance if not something more than that.”

“Hi,” said Marcus, and when she smiled and looked away up the rows of cars, obviously impatient, he had a chance to study her a bit more closely. Her skin was unlined but there was something stark about her shoulder blades. Marcus was wearing sunglasses and she was not, but she did not blink in the full noon sun. Though the salesman was gone, there was still something formidable in her demeanor, which did not in fact make her less attractive to him, since he had not come to Kepler's Fantastic Deals! seeking the company of a soul mate or even a warm and lively chat with a stranger. She seemed a worthy opponent. She wanted what he wanted, and that made him want it all the more.

A couple of minutes later they were pulling out of the lot. Indeed the engine did smoothly purr. Marcus adjusted the rearview and when he checked the side mirrors he noticed how the seat belt sliced across her chest. Only momentarily did he allow himself to entertain this image, for it occurred to him that she and the salesman knew each other, and had he asked first to test-drive the car the salesman would never have allowed him to do so alone, to prevent him from taking off to, God knows, Mexico.

He drove. She said that she didn't want to drive, that she didn't even know enough to be able to tell by driving the car the things she needed to know.

“Fine,” he said, “but I'm not really familiar with the area. Is there a specific route you had in mind?”

“No,” she said. He wondered if it was his slightly formal diction—“a specific route,” God, what a pretentious way to say it—or the notion that a specific route was necessary in this situation that made her sound clipped.

But once out of the lot and onto the boulevard, Marcus was happy not to have her issuing directions. It felt almost as if the car itself were choosing the turns: up the boulevard into town, hard right just past his hotel into a neighborhood backed up on a hill. Yards fenced with piecemeal plywood and sheet metal, small dogs wandering freely among chickens and a few goats tethered to trees, religious shrines elaborate and abundant and mostly devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a tidiness even to the most weathered structures.

His passenger did not seem so enthralled by the world outside the windshield. She had made herself small against the door. From her backpack she had pulled a hooded sweatshirt. Her hands were swallowed by pocket. Marcus could tell by her shoulders, frozen in a shrug, that her fingers were balled into fists. Briefly he worried she'd grown scared of him, but later, much later, she would confess that she'd been freezing. Apparently Marcus had the AC blasting. He didn't feel it. He was just driving. It was the discovery not only of a part of town unknown to him but of the Buick—its low carriage, the slinky way it bounced over potholes, the wideness of its turning, the sunken seats—that contained him entirely.

Marcus said nothing at all when they pulled into the lot. He parked the Buick in its spot between a Saturn and a green Dodge Neon. He got out, opened the hood, stood listening to the tick of the cooling engine. He pretended to know things.

“Well?” said the woman from across the still-warm engine.

“It's perfect,” he said. “I'll take it.”

T
HAT HE MADE NO
effort at all to chat her up—that he barely even glanced at her during the entire ride—played a big part in Maria's decision, though it wasn't exactly a decision, since she never really decided as much as felt. And said what she felt.

It had been some time since she had said what she felt. Years. Who wanted to hear it? What value did it carry?

She had done so once, on a scenic overlook an hour or so from these very roads. A night so clear, a view so thrilling. “Crazy, right?” Randy had said when he parked the Nova and scooted closer to her and pointed to the valley twinkling and stretching away beneath them. He began to talk about what he wanted, as he often had, for he was a boy with a plan. He loved to think and talk about his future, his vision of which was meticulously detailed, right down to the color they'd paint their house, the breed of dogs they'd own, probably even what they would eat for Sunday dinner. And then she'd interrupted him with her news, and though what she revealed was a part of his plan (times three or four or even more, in fact, and it was true that he loved children and was good with them, she'd seen him at play with his little cousins), she could tell it took him out of his idyllic scenario. But only briefly. A few minutes later he had not scrapped his plan but merely moved it around a bit, as if this were only a minor convenience, a slight problem with the sequence.

This made Maria furious. To Randy it was no more a trifle than if Rockfish needed a vocalist instead of a bass player. It was her life also, and her dreams had not been considered separate from his own. In fact, in his dream she was the lone aspect devoid of detail. Had it been a photograph she would have been blemished by shadow.

Thereafter she never much considered the future. Her menus were planned a day or two ahead. Perhaps this was why as a chef she'd gravitated toward all-local ingredients, for improvisation was the key; you made do not only with what was in season but with what was available in enough volume. Thereafter the very thought of frozen food—the staple of so many restaurants—reminded her of Randy's Plan.

And so she had said what she felt. She told him of her desires and she tried to explain to him how having this child now would render those desires (and his, too—she'd been convinced then that his life, too, would have been ruined by his sweet, innocent, but entirely wrongheaded and stubborn insistence on slightly rearranging things to accommodate a baby in the lives of two not much more than babies) impossible; she tried to explain to him that the things she wanted were different from what he wanted, and she tried, she really did try, to do this in a way that did not denigrate his love of the valley stretching beneath them, his love of hunting antelope and loading up ATVs on his uncle's trailer and heading down to Terlingua with his buddies to tear-ass around the sandy hills, his love of brisket and breakfast burritos, of Texas and Texan ways, all those things that her own father loved and that were probably what he loved about Randy.

But of course he felt judged. How could he not?

And so, after Randy died, she left off saying what she felt. She put more stock in the notion of considered decisions. Rather than offer her feelings to the world, she did her homework. She presented facts. It will work better for me this way and here are the reasons why. That her facts were often feelings manipulated or pitched in a way that appeared factual was not lost on those, mostly lovers, to whom these facts were presented. But she wasn't trying to fool her audience as much as she was trying to fool herself.

So when the man said to her over the heat of the ticking engine of the Buick, “It's perfect. I'll take it,” she did not make a decision so much as entertain a feeling. Earlier, Randy's presence, his sweetness seeping through her rigid carriage, warming and maybe even melting her bones a little, softening her usual standoffishness, had led her to pretend to Bobby Kepler that she was
with
this guy and then to get in the car with him. She could have ended up murdered in the backcountry, her body discovered by Border Patrol in some gulch. But Randy whispered, Go with this guy. You can trust him. He's had hard times for sure. You can see it in his eyes and in his shoulders. Whatever he had, it ain't his anymore. Or he don't know how to get it back but he's not yet given up on the getting back.

In the car she felt Randy on the seat between them. He drives good, Randy said, got an easy way behind the wheel. And it felt after a time that the stranger was not in the car at all. She and Randy used to spend hours just riding around talking and looking at things. On weekends they'd head up to Balmorhea to spend the afternoon lying in the sun, their matching Budweiser beach towels coated with coconut tanning oil. Driving home still smelling of the sweet spring that fed the pool and slightly of algae and of the fish that pooled fearlessly just under the surface, they would watch the sun begin its slide down behind the mountains and the rock faces she'd seen so many times before, and the cottonwoods hugging the creek bank, the tassels topping the creosote—all would seem, in the newness of that particular sunset, painted by her and Randy's passage. For years when she wanted to calm her troubled mind, wanted sleep or even waking solace, she put herself in Randy's car, and in his hands, in his care.