All I Have in This World (16 page)

“This man is Mexican?”

“No, he's from North Carolina. So he needed a car because—”

“And you met this man at Kepler's lot? You didn't already know him?”

“I'm trying to tell you what happened. I'm going to, if you would stop interrupting me.”

“Good God Almighty, Maria. You went in on that car with a total stranger?”

Maria kept stirring. A wooden spoon would be preferable because it actually bruises the grains. But Maria's mother did not own a wooden spoon.

“Was it that you needed money? Why did you not just ask me for it?”

“It wasn't the money.”

“You just wanted to share a car with some man who got his truck stolen at the border?”

“He was hiking, I think. It happens. You read about it in the paper.”

“And here I thought you'd grown up.”

“I know what I'm doing.”

“Well, what? Tell me. What is this about?”

“I have to do it. I had this feeling about it and I had to do it because I guess it has to do with—”

“With what?”

“I was about to say. With what happened. Why I left.”

Her mother sat down at the kitchen table. She had so rarely seen her mother sit down in her kitchen without being asked to—she often even ate standing up—that Maria gasped.

“I told you we could share the Cherokee,” her mother said to the table. “If you're looking to share a vehicle.”

“It's not the same. You're my mother.”

“Meaning I'm not going to take off with it one night and sell it in El Paso for drinking money? Is that it? You need somebody to do you wrong? You need somebody to treat you bad so you can feel good about feeling bad?”

“No,” she said, so shocked and hurt by her mother's shallow psychological explanation of her motivation that she dropped the spoon in the pot and gripped the edges of the stove.

“My God in heaven,” her mother said. “I just had no idea.”

“About what? What did you not have an idea about?” said Maria, immediately ashamed of the defensiveness and even hatefulness in her voice, for she knew her mother felt betrayed and she was beginning to understand why and at the same time it wasn't any of her mother's business. Her mother would rather rewire a lamp than have an intimate and uncomfortable conversation with her daughter about the past. Maria asked her mother again what she had no idea about, and her mother, looking as dejected as Maria had ever seen her, said, “I just did not see it, I just didn't, I ought to have, I ought to.”

K
NOWING NOTHING OF THE
musical tastes of the co-owner of Her Lowness did not stop Marcus from spending his day with the car hitting all the thrift shops he could find in search of cassette tapes. The idea overtook him in the night, as did most of his ideas, lucid or not, and any idea solid enough to pierce his state of semiconsciousness struck him as more profound. So seized was he with his plan that he could not return to sleep. His task was essential, it could not be put off; hadn't he, looking over Her Lowness in the lot, planned the appropriate playlist? It wasn't as if the radio were much of an option. He'd switched it on once but a quick twist of the dial had turned up static, save for a couple of Norteño stations, some preaching, and the NPR affiliate he had listened to on his way.

It never occurred to him that his search would be less than successful. In an area where the past was much celebrated and commodified—there were fossil shops, gem shops, Wild West trading posts, Mexican blanket shops, and several joints devoted to the exploitation of the aboriginals, which trafficked in trinkets blatantly Taiwanese and baskets supposedly woven by local Comanches—Marcus thought it plausible that he might discover, in some dusty box alongside such thrift-shop staples as albums by the Ray Price Orchestra and the novels of Irving Stone, a box brimming with obsolete tapes.

Before he even got out of bed, Marcus had jotted down treasures the likes of which, if he even came close to matching them, would usher in a gratification nearly equal to unexpected sex.

• Anything by the Chi-Lites

• Merle Haggard

• The song slash sermons of Shirley Caesar, especially “Don't Drive Your Mama Away”

•
James Gang Rides Again

The list reached the bottom of a legal pad, after which his ink stained the yellow paper with double columns. Once he started on a wish list, he could not stop, which was ironic in that the making of lists had in fact originally been prescribed to him by a monosyllabic psychologist to cure the condition for which Marcus, as a last resort, had paid the man a visit: his life had become ungovernable owing to impulse. He'd visited the man only once, not long before Rebecca left, when it became clear that he would lose his business and his sister's inheritance. What drove him to it was the realization that his idea to build the Flytrap Educational Center had come to him in the middle of one sleepless night and had been put into action—without consulting a soul, not Rebecca or Annie, whose financial futures stood to be affected by his decision—as soon as the bank opened the next morning. He'd waited outside in his car for two hours, sipping coffee, like a drunk in line waiting for the
OPEN
sign to switch on at the liquor store.

This was not the first time he'd acted on such an impulse. At nineteen he had met a girl at an outdoor festival held at a defunct racetrack and married her three days later, fittingly in the state of South Carolina, where there was no blood test required to see if you were marrying your cousin and where bad decisions were encouraged once you crossed out of North Carolina and encountered the massive, cheesy South of the Border, the Mexican-themed tourist trap infamous for its racial insensitivity and overpriced gasoline. That you could buy fireworks legally and get married in a matter of hours in this wretched state was telling, but Marcus liked this girl, whose name was Monte Gale, because she had curly hair down to her shoulders, spoke with a mountain accent so foreign to his ears she might have been Nova Scotian, and wore a straw cowboy hat, which she took off only to shower. He told no one in his family—actually he had told no one at all until he told the bearded doctor—about his marriage, which was only slightly harder to annul than it was to commit.

Though he did not cotton to psychological evaluation, his fifty minutes were far from a waste. Thank you, Doc, for encouraging the supposedly prophylactic benefits of list making. Intended to temper his rashness with forethought, the tactic actually contributed to it. The lists he made made no distinction between impulsive and rational.

Armed with fifty bucks from his stash he could ill afford to part with, Marcus set out on his journey. He had a rule: he could not ask the clerks if they had any cassettes, for numerous and obvious reasons. Such queries would rid the process of serendipity, not to mention mystery. No one in thrift shops ever indulged in the “Can I help you find something?” obsequiousness that marred the shopping experience in venues hawking the brand new. You were left on your lonesome to wander and poke.

But lonesome was what he too often felt. He spent too much time in his head. He'd been accused of same all his life. Besides, the clerks he encountered were exclusively women sixty and upward with faces chapped and wrinkled from high desert wind and sun. Craggy wisdom of the stripe that would do him no good.

“Do you have any cassette tapes?” he asked one in a store.

“Lord, you're going backward, aren't you?” said the woman.

“The past is not even past,” said Marcus.

The woman looked at him long and blankly enough for him to want back inside his head. Rules were in fact necessary.

“If you ask me, it better be. I'm well shy
of
it.”

That beautiful phrase again: “if you ask me.” Anywhere else—back home in particular—he would have found it vain if not redundant. But when people in this place said it, it sounded modest, and entirely generous.

“I hear you,” he said, which was something people said to discourage further conversation. It was what it was not. But Marcus meant it. He, too, was well shy of the past.

“I believe there might be some on a shelf with the books,” the woman said, and Marcus found marvelous the fact that not even the clerks knew the stock.

Because the reign of the cassette tape coincided with his late adolescence and early twenties, his purchases were a sound track from high school and college. How could, in pursuit of obsolete technology, the past not be past? Most of his finds were things he was too much of a music snob back in the day to admit to liking. The first thing he found was a copy of Pure Prairie League's
Bustin' Out,
the big hit of which—a syrupy ballad called “Amie,” featuring a fingerpicked solo geared, in its two-measure brevity, to the attention span of commercial radio—was the only weak song on the album. Next he found a still factory-sealed copy of the sound track from
Saturday Night Fever,
a secret vanity for years. Now that he was old enough to admit that disco did not entirely suck, he had no problems confessing that he admired Yvonne Elliman's version of “Hello Stranger,” almost as much as the phenomenal original by Barbara Lewis.

By early afternoon he had a bag of hits as heavy as a sack of potatoes. And then at his last stop he found a case, dusty and stained but made of a black and crackly vinyl that would look good against the deep blue upholstery of Her Lowness. He could leave them for Maria, a present. When he transferred the contents of the sack to the case, there were only three empty slots. Only then did Marcus remember that he had no idea what sort of music his co-owner preferred. Since she owned half the vehicle, his tapes should take up only half the box. Reluctantly did he subtract some of his treasures and return them to his bag. He could bring them along, though, when it was his turn. But that would be a pain. On impulse he popped open the trunk and hid the bag in the tire well.

The next morning Marcus arrived at the DQ forty-five minutes early. He backed Her Lowness into a spot near the rear of the lot and decided to sit for a while and drink a cup of coffee. He remembered a friend from grad school who was divorced telling him that the most stressful and awkward part of the rearrangement of his family life was the picking up and dropping off of his children: “If I just pull up in the drive and blow the horn, my ex accuses me of acting like a bloody cab driver. If I park the car and ring the bell and come in, there is the great risk that my children will be subjected to the tense and toxic silence—or worse, outright hatefulness—that led to my decision to leave in the first place.” When Marcus naively inquired if some mutually agreed-upon system might be worked out for the sake of the children, his friend looked at him with a mix of pity and incredulity. “Would that it were so easily solved,” said his friend, “but of course if it were, I would still be living with her and there would be nothing to solve.”

The Buick was not a child and Marcus had no reason to assume that there would ever be any tension over its exchange, since Maria was very particular about when and where the drop-off should take place: Marcus was to leave it at the parking lot of the Dairy Queen by eight on her mornings and vice versa. When he offered to deliver it directly to her house in exchange for a ride back, there was, in the way that Maria smiled while declining, a rigidity that Marcus, whose first impression of her was of an easygoing copilot who would leave up to him the majority of the smaller details, found vaguely alarming. As trite as it sounded, people were apt to change after their desires were met.

Sitting in the parking lot of the DQ watching the ranchers in pickups roll in off the highway to fuel their morning with food fast and greasy, Marcus watched a boy in a paper hat and brown DQ-issue polyester uniform wheel a mop bucket out the back door, dump it into a drain in the pavement. The sudsy water spilled wildly out of the bucket and began its surge toward Her Lowness, a black tide rising. Monte Gale in her cowgirl hat stretched across the bed of a Mexican-themed motel nearly thirty years ago. And in
only
her hat, her skin reddened and sweaty from sex. Marcus had gotten up and fetched her a cigarette from his pants pocket and lit one for himself, which he smoked naked on the balcony at dusk. Just beyond a cockleburred patch of grass and a fence separating the motel from an access road, cars and trucks fled north and south on I-95. Miami to Maine, that highway stretched, and he'd never been to New York. Plastic bags aloft in the breeze kicked up by the traffic caught in the diamonds of the chain link. Marcus was nineteen and he was married. His parents had been married for a quarter century at this point, but Marcus had seen them in the same room only twice in the past five years: once for a funeral, again for Annie's graduation from Sweet Briar. He had tried hard with Rebecca, initially at least, to prove wrong their careless way with love, but now he imagined his presence in her life relegated to a photo album packed in a box, in which his image was no more significant than one of those strangers who crop up in the background of pictures, caught by timing and chance forever in the frame.

He had not thought of Monte Gale in years and years. “Come back,” she'd called to him as he studied the flow of traffic on the interstate, and the sex they had next was rhythmically disappointing, as if they were in different time signatures. At first Marcus thought it was because they were married, until he remembered that this was the first time they'd as much as touched while sober.

Was it the sudden wind whirlpooling dust and straw wrappers in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen that ushered in his fear that he'd Monte Gale'd again? Or was it the thought of his legal pad defiled with a list of cheesy records from his youth, a list he chose over
the
list, the one he'd made the morning after his truck was stolen? That list was a recipe for survival; though it was padded with the trivial, most of its items were responsible ones. Again he had been sidetracked by the inconsequential. “Of making many books there is no end,” was one of the few quotes he remembered from the Bible, and did it not distinguish between word and deed?