All I Have in This World (5 page)

But on the way to the motel, her mother spoke only of the motel. On the tour, Maria recognized two of the girls hired to clean rooms—Consuela Navarette and Luisa Jaquez—from high school. Had she not been held back she'd have graduated with them. As she chatted awkwardly with them and her mother, her mind got stuck on the phrase
held back.
Was that how she'd lived her life since that day she left? While her mother was at work, Maria had packed a suitcase and called a friend she knew she could trust to drive her to the train station. She took Amtrak first to Las Cruces and then, after a few weeks' work at a Dairy Queen and truly terrifying nights at the Desert Treasure Inn, a Greyhound to San Luis Obispo, chosen for its name. She liked the familiarity of Spanish, though she spoke it badly because her father had been paddled in grade school for not speaking English and therefore was not inclined to speak it to his Anglo wife and children.

She had left a note of apology for her parents but she did not say where she was going because she had no idea. Her parents were better off with her gone, which was one reason she had not returned for so long, even for her father's funeral—not out of spite but in deference to the suffering she had caused him, which she believed to be so deep that attending his funeral would have gone beyond hypocritical into just plain mean.

“I need to run check on that clerk I hired last week,” said Maria's mother. “If I don't stay on him, he'll keep somebody on hold for five minutes and lose a room.”

The way Consuela and Luisa turned warmer and more relaxed in her mother's absence confirmed what Maria suspected: that her mother was a harsh and humorless boss.

“Girl, you are so thin,” said Luisa, reaching out to touch her just above her hip in a way so guileless that Maria wanted to hug her.

“You take after your mother,” said Consuela, which made Maria anxious until she realized they envied her mother's metabolism.

They talked a few minutes more, of things that happened so long ago they appeared to flicker in memory as if on a grainy newsreel. At the sight of her mother coming along carrying a stack of clean towels, the girls excused themselves and disappeared into the open room. Maria waited outside while her mother delivered instructions on which rooms needed cleaning.

“I didn't realize you knew them,” her mother said on the way to her office.

“We were in the same class.”

“I guess what I ought to say is I did not realize they knew you. They never mentioned you to me.”

Why would they? Her mother's way with them did not encourage the sharing of personal information. Plus, everyone in this town knew what had happened, particularly those who were in the same class as she and Randy. Why would they risk bringing it up? Her mother's cluelessness was unlike her, but Maria held her tongue and accompanied her mother on the tour of the motel, which seemed cleaner than she remembered it, though no less worn. On the tour, her mother mentioned Ray only in the context of repairs or additions or the lack thereof. Maria tried to remember what he looked like. She'd met him only a few times over the years because usually when her mother was at work, Ray was at home, as he had worked the night shift before her mother switched over. Maria had been surprised to see that he was white, though she wasn't at all sure why; just because her father was Hispanic did not mean that her mother preferred only Hispanics. She'd suspected there was something between Ray and her mother before she'd left home, but only in that vague way in which a suspicion crosses your mind like a cloud over a mountain, temporarily darkening it. Ray was not only white but terribly white, the sort of white person whose skin takes on the glow of fluorescent lights from too much time under their flickering buzz. She had no idea where the man was from, but she suspected he was not from around here, or even Texas, and she wondered why, given his pallor, he would choose to live in a place so close to the sun.

They had come to the restaurant. In high school it had been called Johnny Garcia's. She had come here after games for burritos. Now it was empty, its doors padlocked. Her mother searched her key chain and unlocked the door and led them inside. Dust coated the counters. In the deep triple sink was a pile of broken dishes, and a few novena candles were still set out on the tabletops.

“Johnny Garcia died about seven years ago. His son wanted to take over the business, but Ray said no. Funniest thing, toward the end of his life, Ray got this thing about Mexicans. All the years I knew him he never had an unkind word to say about any of them, but when he got sick it affected his brain, I guess, and overnight he was convinced he was being trailed by members of the cartel and that they were going to take him across to Ojinaga and assassinate him, which is how I knew he was sick in the first place.”

“What did he die of ?”

“What a mess,” her mother said. “I haven't been in here in ages. I need to get the girls in here and clean this sty.”

She turned to Maria as if she'd been talking to herself. “Alzheimer's.”

Maria nodded, then swallowed. The math hit her without her even having to add: If Johnny Garcia died seven years ago, and Ray was already sick, that meant her father would have been in the last stages of cancer when Ray was diagnosed. How could her mother have endured all that and kept her house running, and a motel? No wonder she was too tired to run it.

“Did Ray have any family?”

“Somewhere. Ohio? Oklahoma? Starts with an
O.
”

“But none came to help?”

“He never talked about any of that with me.”

At least she'd had a few years with her lover, Maria had thought after her mother wrote to tell her of Ray's death and asked her to come home. But the whole time her mother had been reminding Ray to eat and trying to keep him from wandering out into the street, she'd also nursed her father, who had no insurance and hated hospitals and demanded to be taken home to die in the very bedroom where he had always seemed so out of place. For the first time ever she came close to asking her mother why she stayed with her father all those years, when he must have known about Ray. How had he lived with that? She knew him to be the kind of man who cared how others saw him, which is why Randy's death bothered him so deeply. But this was not the time to ask such a question, if indeed she was going to find a time, after not having laid eyes on her mother for ten years and neglecting her during that time of life when, though her mother would never have accepted help from her or anyone else, she might at least need someone to call her every day and ask her what she'd had to eat or whether it had rained, some small, mundane question that had nothing at all to do with whatever answer she supplied and everything to do with the sound of their voices traveling hundreds of miles to close the distance between them.

M
ARCUS SLEPT POORLY, DESPITE
the fact that he'd driven over ten hours that day. All night he was awakened by train clank and warning beep. In the morning he walked across the street to the Fina station for gas-station coffee and a breakfast taco. This was a luxury, as he was accustomed to eating only one real meal a day, consisting of items bought on the cheap in a grocery store and kept fresh in an Igloo in the cab of the truck. Restaurants did not fit the budget. All he'd managed to hide from Annie and the bank was several thousand dollars—about twenty, give or take what it would require to get him down to San Miguel. Aside from the money, he had only his truck, a Ford F-150 434 with only 70K on it, and the contents of its bed: clothes, a few cooking implements, a bicycle, some couple of dozen books, and three boxes of sentimental junk—deeds, maps, love letters, a family Bible charting the lineage of those who had occupied the land he'd let the bank take away.

Shedding all the detritus of home did not bother him. He loved a certain type of movie in which a drifter turned up. The drifter was all about the present tense. If the actor was any good, you could see—in the way he lay across his cot smoking, wearing a wife beater, with his feet flat upside the pine-paneled walls of the trailer house behind the diner, horse farm, or sawmill where some gruff but kindly soul had given him gainful employment—the terminal crush of his yesterday.

The present-tense drifter might occasionally be sighted in some rainy city, but small towns and back roads were his territory. Here is Marcus Banks drifting right on up into right now. Good riddance to those years saddled by something chthonic and corrosive in the land he'd lost. Marcus here, Marcus now. He timed his steps down the street to the beat.

Pinto Canyon, Texas, came to life quickly of a morning. Three-quarters of the vehicles passing by on the street were pickups, and two-ton ones at that, which seemed to Marcus a good sign. Ranchers, maybe a few farmers. It felt like a fine place to break his trip, even though he knew he could stretch out his stash far longer across the border. The quicker he crossed over, the sooner he'd be able to live off something other than peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But he broke his fast on a bench by the train station, conjuring a new diet heavy on tortillas. Never again the tasteless squares of whole wheat Merita that passed for healthy from the Winn-Dixie in Silt. Everything swaddled in a layer of warm corn and flour. The chorizo in the burrito was so delicious that he walked back across the street and told the desk clerk he'd like to keep his room through the weekend.

Afterward he strolled the streets sipping coffee, checking out a hardware store, a thrift shop, and more than one gallery with questionable art more of the southwestern than border variety. Though what did he know? He'd never even given a thought to the notion of Texas. He'd only changed planes in Dallas once on his way to Mexico with Rebecca. It was one of the few places in the country that had somehow escaped his curiosity.

Small towns are the same anywhere, he'd been taught to believe, but this wasn't Silt, which allowed him, walking the streets, a comfortable anonymity. Though no one he encountered was unfriendly, they did not know him beyond his smile, his nod, if they even noticed him at all. They did not know his family, his failures. They did not know or care that the money he paid with belonged by rights legal and ethical to his sister.

For weeks he had looked forward to disappearing, and walking the streets that afternoon, it seemed small-town Texas was just as good a place to court invisibility as Mexico. At least here he sort of spoke the language.

But this was still town. Marcus had come to prefer the country. He'd been happiest living twelve miles of back roads from Silt, which could only generously be referred to as town. Rebecca was of a decidedly more urban stripe. Once a week or so, Marcus would give in and take her into Wilmington, where they would shop at Target and see a movie and eat overpriced pasta and drink a bottle of wine marked up enough to make Marcus wince. Then they would head home up Highway 17 and turn finally onto 431, and immediately the wayside would close in above them, canopy even in the wintry months, turning their journey shadowy and lush, as if they were driving straight into a secret.

Marcus would welcome what Rebecca would dread. As they drove home, she'd tense up against the passenger door, so far away he felt his voice rising when he tried to small-talk her out of her moodiness.

The day she left, she said for the first time what she'd known for months, and what he had known she had known, had felt in the way she held it in: “You say you can't move because of your business, but your business is about to get taken away from you.”

“It's not as bad as all that,” he said.

“You think I don't ever get the mail? You're always trying to beat me out to the box, but sometimes the mailman comes when you're up at the center. Jesus, Marc. Just say it.”

“Say what?”

“You won't move for me. You'd rather stay here and lose everything than meet me halfway.”

“Where is halfway?” he said, and it had turned out to be the last thing he'd said to Rebecca before she got in her Honda and drove away.

Remembering these words made Marcus crave back road. He needed to see the desert in daylight. According to the map, Big Bend National Park was nearby. A short hike would feel good after all those days driving. He was headed back to the hotel to fetch his truck when he spotted a park ranger coming out of the TransPecos Bank.

Marcus's long-standing admiration of park rangers had peaked when he'd briefly been one himself. Well, sort of—he neither wore a khaki uniform nor drew a pension from state or government, but he was stationed there at the center to answer the questions, however idiotic, his visitors asked about the local flora. Who better to ask about a hike than a park ranger?

The man was halfway into his vehicle when Marcus hailed him from the middle of the street.

“Excuse me,” said Marcus. “I'm assuming you work down in the park?” Marcus knew enough not to call it by its full, proper name, having visited enough parks on his fact-finding road trip to know that employees and locals always referred to Yellowstone or Great Smoky Mountains as “the park.”

The man nodded. He looked to be about thirty. He had his keys in his hand, his other hand on the door of his truck. Marcus attributed his standoffishness to the fact that he'd just come out of a bank. Terrible places run by crooks. He was about to say so to the ranger but remembered his John Waters comment to the desk clerk and thought that, now that he was among people again, he best stick to business instead of trying to come across as funny or conspiratorial.

“I'm just here for a few days. You wouldn't happen to know of a day hike down in the park, or anywhere around here, that would not prove too strenuous for a man who has been living at sea level for the last decade?”

“Where you coming from?” asked the ranger. He relaxed a bit, put his keys in his pocket, but still seemed a little curt, as if it should have been obvious to Marcus that he was off the clock.