B004XTKFZ4 EBOK (22 page)

“We need to get
away,
Franny.”

“No.”

She looked at me, her face tight with perplexity.

“No?” she said. “Really? No?”

“No,” I whispered.

We looked at each other. After a while I placed my palm on the window screen. She did the same. I could feel the pressure of her hand pushing against mine.

Then she moved away. “You’re not gonna rat on me, are you, Fran?”

“Lucy, just go home. Go
home.
”

She sighed. “Okay.”

“Really? You will?”

“Sure. Stupid idea anyway.”

“Go home, Lucy. Go to sleep. Maybe things will look different in the morning.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe we can—maybe they’ll let us see each other. Or maybe we can talk on the phone.”

“Yeah.”

“And we’ll write to each other. Wherever we are. Long letters.”

“Sure.”

“And then, when we’re older—” I felt my voice breaking, my life breaking. “When we’re older we’ll…we’ll…”

“Sure, Franny-Fran.” She began to move off, the night swallowing her.

“You’re going home, Lucy? Really?”

“Yeah. ’Bye, Fran.”

“’Bye, Lucy.”

She disappeared into the darkness.

The next morning, quite early—it was still dark—Aunt Louise came in with two big suitcases and slowly began folding my things into them. She didn’t tell me why. I didn’t need to ask.

“I can do that, Aunt Louise.”

She glanced at me. “It’s all right,” she said. She kept folding. “You be ready in an hour, okay? Frank will drive you to the station and see that you get on the bus all right.”

“Okay. I’m—I’m sorry, Aunt Louise.”

She didn’t reply. It took only a few minutes to pack my things. She left.

I didn’t see her again. I saw only my uncle, grim-faced. He helped me put my bags in the car.

Standing there in the driveway, moments from leaving Quiet, California forever—or at least for the next thirty years—I looked over at the Sparrows’ house. It was silent and still in the unknowing dawn.

—Thirteen—

IT TOOK ME one week to find him.

Driving across the Mojave Desert one sees little but an endless canvas of white, broken occasionally by indistinct blurs of tan or beige or ochre. Joshua trees, sage, and cactus predominate, when there’s anything living at all. It’s then, at midday, with no live thing in one’s range of vision, no cars in sight, that it seems as if what one is really traversing is the bright side of the moon. It’s almost impossible to imagine that the air outside the car windows is breathable, and indeed, it hardly is: the heat gives it a thickness that’s stubbornly difficult to pull into human lungs. The ribbon of road stretches into the glaring distance farther than one can see, seemingly forever.

Yet eventually, rising like some garish phoenix out of the ashes, comes civilization, or at least Las Vegas—that most unnatural of cities. I’d been here once as a college girl, on a senior trip with friends; I remembered the basic layout of the place, the creepy timelessness of the never-closing bars and casinos, the cheap and vulgar tone of it all, the way that, up close, everything seemed smaller than it should have been, and dirtier.

And yet I’d enjoyed it then; I enjoyed it now, after the newspaper offices and libraries were closed, once there was really nothing more I could do that day. I spent too much money, as one always does in Las Vegas. I played slots and poker. I socialized with boozy salesmen from Oklahoma, overweight executives from Chicago, and nervous college boys from Connecticut, one of whom came to my room one night and left, of course, before the next morning.

I wasted time, I wasted money. But in the end I found him.

As it turned out, he didn’t really live in Las Vegas, or if he did, it was at the very limit of the town. It was a long drive on a road white with desert dust, past all houses, all businesses, any signs of life. I was sure I’d taken a wrong turn; there was nothing out here but sun, sky, small hills in the distance. And yet, finally, quite literally at the end of the road, I saw a wooden shack.

It was truly a shack. Warped, dilapidated, the sight of it reminded me of nothing so much as period photographs of the Depression. It had a single window in the front, gray with grime. There was an old car parked beside the structure, but it didn’t look drivable. It was as if the desert were about to swallow this place, push it down with its winds, bury it in its sands. At first I couldn’t believe that anybody really lived here; surely it had been abandoned years before.

And yet as I sat in my air-conditioned car looking at the place, the door was pulled open. I knew then that I was in the wrong location, for out stepped an old man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a plain blue work shirt and jeans. His sparse hair was white, stringy, sprouting in different directions on his head. He was stooped over to an extent that it appeared as if he had a hump on his back; his head, as he moved, tilted down at a precarious angle. His mouth was perpetually open and I could see a line of suspiciously full and even teeth: surely dentures. He’d seen me, or heard me; it couldn’t have been difficult, out here in the desert silence. He looked at me, head facing down, eyes looking up under his white and overgrown eyebrows.

I was about to put the car in gear, perhaps mouth the word
Sorry
as I pulled away, but he waved to me. His arm moved unnaturally, jerkily, like a marionette’s. He seemed to be smiling, but in that ancient face it was hard to tell: he might just have been squinting his eyes in the brightness.

I rolled my window down a crack. The furnace-air hit my eyes, made them water.

“Got my groceries?” he called from across the street, his voice high and wheezy, as if with each word he somehow leaked air.

“Your…? No, I’m sorry. I think I made a wrong turn.”

He looked at me, mouth hanging. His skin was hard, leathery, nearly mummified. It seemed pasted to his bones, as if there were nothing underneath it at all: no muscle, no fat. I couldn’t even imagine how old this man must be, or how long he had left to live.

“Wrong turn?” he called. “Where you goin’?”

I rolled the window down a bit further, felt my face burst into a sweat almost instantly. “I’m looking for a Mike Jones,” I said, giving the name I’d been told he used now, had been using for the past decade since he’d been free.

The man smiled then—it truly was a smile, I saw his mouth curve crookedly upward—and walked toward my car.

“I’m Mike Jones,” he rasped.

I stared at him as he shuffled toward me, becoming ever larger in my field of vision. It was impossible, I realized; I’d been given bad information. He came up to me and I said, “Well, I think I have the wrong person. It must be a different Mike Jones I’m looking for. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Well,” he said, “don’t gotta be in a rush. Have some water before you go.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Jones, but I’m okay.” I held up the bottle of water that I’d been slowly sipping for hours.

“Um.” He was visibly disappointed. Part of his face, I saw, seemed frozen, or if not frozen, at least stiffened, difficult to move. That was why his smile was crooked. Stroke, I realized.

I was at a dead end, it seemed—literally and figuratively. My head hurt from the desert heat as well as from the liberal amount of drinking I’d been doing since I hit Vegas. Like most alcoholics, I never had hangovers; but I still could find myself feeling tired and achy after a night’s indulgence. The memory of the college student who’d leapt so enthusiastically into my hotel bed, only to crawl out again under cover of darkness, didn’t help. I wondered what it took to find a man who wouldn’t be ashamed to look at me when he woke in the morning. Of course, in truth, I disliked looking at myself in the morning too.

“Well, Mr. Jones, it’s been nice talking to you—”

“Young lady,” he said, “would you do me a favor?”

I looked at him. “What’s that?”

He licked his cracked lips. “Well, fact is, the woman who’s supposed to bring my groceries ain’t showed up. Thought she was due yesterday, but I ain’t seen her. Don’t know where she is.”

“Can’t you call her?”

“Ain’t got a phone, young lady. Just live out here by myself.”

“You have a car.”

“That thing? That thing ain’t run in five years. I can’t drive no more, anyway. Can’t see nothin’.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but…”

“What I mean is, could you give me a ride to the store?”

I looked at him. He was quivering, I realized; Parkinson’s, or something like it. The veins on the backs of his hands were dark and jagged against the liver spots on his skin.

“Well, I—Mr. Jones—”

“Sure be a help,” he said. “Don’t know what happened to her. She’s always so reliable. Unless,” he said, “you’re in a hurry.”

“Well, yes, I—I am.”

He nodded. “Okay, then. Sorry to bother you. Have a nice day.” And with that he turned, very slowly, and began making his way to the shack again.

I watched him. Finally I called, “Mr. Jones?”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Where—where is the store?”

He shuffled toward me again, stopped halfway in the road. He pointed. “There’s a little place over yonder,” he said. “’Bout two miles. Dirt track. Your car’d be okay.”

I frowned, but knew I would be consumed with guilt if I left this ancient man with no help at all. I studied him: he was truly no threat. He was a man who was about to die.

“Well—you’re sure it’s two miles?”

“Positive.”

I sighed. “Well—I guess. All right.”

He smiled again. “Let me get my money, okay?”

“Yes, sure.”

He moved off, noticeably more energetic now. I rolled up my window, unlocked the passenger door. I pulled the car around so that he would be able to step straight out of his front door into the vehicle without crossing the road.

“Hey, thanks,” he said when he appeared again. He stepped gingerly in.

“Now,” I said, “you have to give me directions.”

He did. We drove for perhaps a mile back the way I’d come, then took a dusty fork in the road I’d not even noticed before. It belatedly occurred to me that I might have offered him the use of my cell phone to call the person he was expecting, but by this point it was too late. Another mile or so brought us to a tiny brick building: the store. I went in with him. The place was old, perhaps as old as he was. Native American rugs and geegaws were everywhere, along with a small selection of groceries. I held a basket for him as he picked up bread, coffee, beef jerky, cans of beer. As we reached the counter the proprietor, a pale heavyset man in a T-shirt who looked nothing like a Native American, greeted him in a friendly way: “Nice to see you, Mr. Jones,” he said, ringing up the purchases. He glanced at me, smiling. “Ma’am.”

“Hello.”

“Mr. Jones, is this Eloise’s replacement?”

“Hah?”

“Eloise. Is this lady her replacement? Is she helping you now?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout no replacement.”

“Sure you do, Mr. Jones,” the proprietor said. “Eloise was moving, remember? You were supposed to call the—”

Mr. Jones looked up. “I forgot,” he said wheezily. “By damn, I forgot all about that.”

“Forgot?” The proprietor looked genuinely concerned. “Hey, Mr. Jones, you’d better use our phone here. Call them, get her replacement lined up.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, paying. “Yeah, I’d better do that.”

The proprietor produced a phone, handed the receiver to Mr. Jones. “Do you remember the number?”

“I—no. No, I don’t think I do. Got it written down, but that’s back at the house.”

“Well, then, you just call the Operator.” The proprietor punched the zero.

While Mr. Jones took care of his business, the proprietor looked at me. Before he asked I said, “I just happened to take a wrong turn onto his road. I don’t even know him.”

“Well,” he said, “you did your good deed for the day. Old Mr. Jones is kind of feeble these days.” Then, more quietly, “Likely to die out in that shack sometime.”

I nodded. After a few minutes the old man concluded his business, and we headed back up the road.

When it hit me it really wasn’t a surprise; I guess part of me had realized it all along. But it was only when he offered me a piece of jerky, saying, “I really ought to give you somethin’ to eat, lovely lady like you,” that I admitted to myself that this man was, of course, Mike McCoy. Through the wheezing, air-filled sound of his aged voice, the words
lovely lady—
their tone, their inflection—were unmistakable.

We pulled up to his shack.

“Wanna come in?” he asked.

I looked at him closely, this harmless old desert rat.