Babylon and Other Stories (17 page)

“You are like paranoid,” Maxine said.

Yuri seemed to enjoy the desert. Bat had just gotten his license and bought an old Chevy Malibu—probably with his drug money, Maxine thought—and the two of them spent a lot of time driving around outside town, Yuri staring quietly at the juniper and yucca, the pink and pocked brown of the rolling canyons. They drove to the falls at night and swam in the turquoise water, or threw rocks at the ducks in the Pecos. All this Bat reported to Maxine, speaking in a hushed tone, when they met in the hallway at home.

“He's my shadow,” Bat said. “But I have to say he's not a bad guy.”

Maxine didn't see either of them very much. She was a junior and taking AP English and practicing for the SATs. More than anything she wanted to go away to school, someplace east, with leaves changing in the fall and tall brick buildings stacked with dusty books, anywhere away from the desert, from Furr's and JCPenney. Her history teacher, Mr. Vasquez, was coaching her on the SATs. He was a short man whose receding hairline revealed dark freckles on his head as it went. She wondered whether they'd been there his whole life, waiting under his hair, or had come into existence only as his scalp came into contact with the sun. In class he wheezed nervously and coughed a lot, but one-on-one, talking with Maxine about her education, he grew passionate and raised his voice. He felt strongly about her future. He talked about the Ivy League, which she always pictured as a huge dome, like a football stadium garlanded with vines, spanning all the New England states.

“The SATs are your passport out of here, Maxine,” Mr. Vasquez said, and she very much wanted this to be true.

On Thanksgiving, Yuri took careful bites of the sweet potato and marshmallow casserole. “This is delicious, Mrs. Watson,” he said. He said this about everything. Maxine suspected he'd been coached.

On Christmas Day he went into Bat's room and brought out small wrapped gifts: for Maxine and their mother, beaded necklaces; for Bat and their father, Communist Party watches. One had a hammer and sickle where the twelve should be, and the other had a tank. Bat got the tank version and loved it, showing it all around school. Some guy whose father was in the reserves called him a Communist, and after the fight Bat came home with a bruised cheek and a black eye. But he kept wearing the watch.

Yuri received letters from the USSR, odd, blocky handwriting on thin blue paper with many stamps, a single page folded over itself to make an envelope. One night after dinner he reached into the pocket of his jeans and unfolded one of these. Inside was a picture of his two little sisters, ten-year-old twins with black hair in braids.

“They're adorable,” Maxine's mother said.

“Bat will meet them when he comes to Soviet Union to live with us.”

“Well, we'll see about that,” she said.

Maxine's mother came home from work and propped her aching feet in their nurse's shoes up on a chair. Maxine brought her a glass of iced tea. Her mother sipped it and asked her to spend more time with Yuri and Bat.

“I'm afraid they're becoming too attached,” she said.

“I thought you wanted them to be attached. You wanted Bat to have a friend. You imported a friend for him from another country.”

“Don't be so dramatic, honey.”

“I have things to do.”

Maxine's mother drained her tea and raised an eyebrow. “You're seventeen years old,” she said. “Get out of the house.”

So Maxine took the boys to the Living Desert, where they wandered listlessly down the nature trail and stared at the antelope. The antelope stared back just as blankly. Yuri stumbled and stuck his hand into a prickly pear, its spines puncturing his palm, but he said he was fine. They went up to the cages at feeding time and watched a snake choke down a bird. Then they walked around the nature center, looking at rocks split open to show the minerals inside.

“Okay, this is boring, Max,” Bat said.

“Yeah, it is boring,” Yuri echoed. His accent had picked up a Southwestern tinge, making him sound like a Russian cowboy. They went to the Dairy Queen and had blizzards. This was what there was to do in Carlsbad. Out of here, thought Maxine, looking at the white plastic chairs and the soft-serve machine. Soon.

She offered to take them to the Caverns, but Yuri refused, explaining that he was afraid of the dark. She didn't believe this for one second—he spent hours at a time with Bat in his murky room, listening to Pink Floyd—but she didn't protest. The boys went off together, arguing about something. Bat's face was less pale than it used to be, with all the time they spent out in the desert. Yuri, too, looked less pale, the circles under his eyes having faded to light purple. When she saw them now she remembered being with Bat on the Fourth of July, driving down to the beach with their parents to watch the fireworks over the Pecos, Bat as a little kid, with a summer tan and still Brian then, laughing his head off at the explosions.

Then Yuri knocked on her bedroom door, late.

“Bat's sick,” he said. “He drank too much beer.” He led her outside to Bat's car, where her brother was slumped heavily against the passenger window.

“Who drove home?” she said.

“I did.”

“You know how to drive?”

“I have seen Bat do it.”

They dragged Bat into the house and laid him on the bed.

There was vomit matted in his hair. His lips hung slackly down to the blanket and he started to drool. “We have to keep him on his side, so he won't choke on his vomit,” Yuri said. “I learned this at your school.”

“I'm glad American education's so useful,” Maxine said.

They arranged Bat on his side, and he snorted a little.

She got a bucket from the hall closet and put it on the floor next to the bed. “Well,” she said. “Good job, Yuri.”

They went outside and sat on the curb in front of the house. It was three o'clock in the morning, in April, and the air felt humid and warm. Yuri smoked a cigarette. When he was done he lay down on his back on the thick grass and looked at the stars. Maxine wanted to ask him about the constellations, whether they looked the same from the USSR or different, but when she started talking she realized that he was asleep.

The next morning Bat couldn't leave his bed. He tried claiming he had the flu, but the stench of beer on his clothes gave him away.

Maxine's mother lectured him for a long time. Then she turned to Yuri. “I thought you were different,” she said bitterly. He looked confused and said nothing. “I thought you would help him.”

“Give him a break, Mom,” Maxine said. “He's not from here, he doesn't know.”

He stared at his shoes, as if they were discussing some other, absent person.

Maxine decided it would be good to get him out of the house, so she drove him out the winding road to the Caverns. “It's the only place you haven't been in Carlsbad,” she said. “People come from all over the world to see this. You have to.”

Yuri lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window. He shrugged. “If I have to.”

She led him down the winding steps to the mouth of the Caverns. Families lingered in the sun outside, pressing the audio guides to their ears. Inside, it wasn't very crowded and they followed the spotlit path into the dark chambers. Maxine had been here a million times. The air was clammy and smelled acridly of bat guano.

“At sunset,” she told Yuri, “the bats fly out into the sky, hundreds of them. The sky is all blue and orange and pink and full of bats. They spend the night looking for food and then come back in.”

“Like your brother looking for beer.”

“Yeah,” she said, “something like that.”

“Will they attack me, the bats?”

“I think they sleep during the day.”

“Also like your brother!” Yuri grinned, and she smiled back at him.

She tugged at his sleeve, shyly, and walked to the start of the trail. Secretly, and even though it was always full of tourists, she liked the Caverns. She liked the twisted, gnarled formations, the marble colors in them, the improbable shapes. She liked the ones that stretched from floor to ceiling in tensed arcs, like rubber
bands. They looked like they could move—and they were moving, in a way, if you thought about it; they were the movement of water made visible.

“The water drips all the time,” she whispered to Yuri. “Can you hear it dripping? It leaves deposits behind. It takes years and years to make these things. Stalactites are from the top, stalagmites are from the bottom.”

Yuri grabbed her hand, and his palm was sweaty. “I do not like caves,” he said.

“It's okay,” she told him, “Come on. It's a little slippery, so walk slow.” She pulled his reluctant hand and led him farther down. The path circled lower and lower until it brought them to the darkest part of the cavern. The formations were barely visible, pale and pink, like shy ghosts. Above them people stood higher on the trail, their voices echoing through the chamber. The lights up there looked as clustered and distant as a faraway town, as Carlsbad did when you were driving in from Artesia. Yuri stood behind her. He put his hands on her hips.

“Do you feel okay?” she asked him.

He nodded and his hair brushed against her cheek. He clasped his hands over her stomach. She thought of his two sisters, their braids flying as they ran across the snowy steppes, their pale faces turned to the sky. She thought of the beaded necklace he'd given her, curled up in her jewelry box for safekeeping.

“You are very pretty,” he said in her ear.

She loved his accent. He put his hands on her chest, one palm cupping each breast, his fingertips making tiny, almost unbearable movements over the fabric of her shirt, like water flowing in slow, insistent drops. She stood still.

Six months later, Maxine received a letter from Yuri. It was written on thin blue paper in blocky handwriting, just like the
ones he used to get from his family. On the stamps were pictures of the crown jewels of Russia.

In Moscow, she walked alone to the Kremlin, drifting past its spiky towers and tiers of gold domes. Among the crowds she could hear the drone of tour guides reciting historical facts in English and French. This was ten years later. Her husband, Ross, worked for a pharmaceutical company in Chicago and was allowed to bring Maxine on this business trip. The Russians were in dire need of pharmaceuticals, he said, they needed new drugs for the new Russia, and he was busy with them from morning to night. Maxine had wanted badly to come along—never having traveled much—but now that she was here, on her own, she felt listless and cold and had to fight the urge to stay in the hotel room with her work. She was in graduate school, and school was the only place she seemed to feel at home. To get herself out of the hotel she began to treat the trip as a type of class and pored over the guidebook, learning to decipher a few of the signs, memorizing
random architectural details. Each day she assigned herself sights to see: museums and palaces and armories, grand old buildings with vaulted ceilings and gilded paintings and firearms.

She bought a set of nesting dolls for her mother—the outermost shell a stocky, dark-haired peasant girl, the innermost a baby so small that she could squeeze it in her palm—then walked out into Red Square. Russians strode quickly past her, their faces set, carrying plastic shopping bags. Back home, in Chicago, she had read about food lines, poverty, and political chaos, but there were few signs of this, at least in the places within walking range of the hotel. She had an uneasy feeling that things were being concealed, were beyond her reach, whether because of the country or her own failing, she wasn't sure.

She shivered in her light coat and crossed her arms over her chest. With a slightly guilty feeling she retreated to the hotel room and ordered soup and coffee from room service. She opened her guidebook to the map of Moscow, then flipped to the map of Russia. She tried to remember the name of Yuri's town, far in the north, but had forgotten it. Only Bat would remember the name. He lived in Oregon now, where he operated his own business, a company that sold hemp products through the mail. Despite their parents' fears, Bat seemed to have turned out all right; he was kind of a hippie, maybe, but he supported himself and had a small house in the woods.

Maxine stood in the chilly hotel room and looked out the window. Traffic blared below her. She and her brother hardly ever spoke, and he rarely went home to visit. She thought of his face when she and Yuri came home from the Caverns that day. He was sitting in front of the TV, drinking a Coke, and they sat down next to him, close together on the couch. Bat started to say something,
but then, looking at them, stopped. At the time she wasn't thinking about Bat at all. She was too wrapped up in remembering the minutes she'd just spent, how she and Yuri had walked up the hill out of the darkness of the Caverns, his fingers brushing against hers, furtive, barely there, yet electric. They emerged into the sudden, blinding desert sun and it shocked her, as if she'd been expecting midnight.

Spike proposed to me at the bus station. It was November and we stood outside shivering and smoking cigarettes, our breath merging with the exhaust from departing buses. Spike stuck one hand in the pocket of his jeans, blew smoke, and said thoughtfully, almost to himself, “We should get married.”

“What did you say?” I said.

“On second thought, never mind,” he said. He dropped his cigarette to the ground and picked up my bag, then his.

“What do you mean, never mind?” We had never discussed marriage before. Spike smiled and put his arm around me, guiding me toward our bus. He kissed the skin below my ear.