Calling Out (25 page)

He shimmies himself out from under, and dirtsmeared and hair askew, leans against the cinder-block
foundation.

“Well, well, well,” he says, pushing his hair from his
eyes with his wrist. “Welcome to Moab.”

He holds up his greasy hands and I pull him to his
feet.

“Why don't I fix us dinner and you can tell me all
about it,” he says.

He takes my hand and I follow.

As Ford serves up the rice and beans, I tell him about
my night with Sam Gomez.

“Oh, Jane,” he says.

“I'd gotten really complacent about the danger. I
started to think I really was doing a good thing.”

He comes around the little table and takes a seat next
to me.

“He told me to be a good sport,” I say. Ford winces but
then we start to laugh despite ourselves.

“I guess this means I quit,” I say. “And now, I don't
know.” I take a huge gulp of beer.

“I'm glad,” he says.

“Little by little you make compromises and
allowances. You're just answering the phones, then you're
only stripping—hey, it's legal, it's not such a big deal—
and then it's just your body and it makes someone else
happy. Pretty soon you wake up and you are doing things
that you would have never deemed okay.”

“I assume the ‘you' in this scenario is you,” he says.

I laugh. “It's that obvious?”

The wind has picked up outside, and through the
window there is nothing but dark.

“How are you anyway?”

“I'm just fine,” he says.

“I saw Ember,” I say.

Ford nods and reaches for a tortilla.

“She's planning on going to Spain or some grand plan
like that.”

“That sounds like her,” he says.

“I imagine she left your heart pounded to
smithereens.”

“Yeah, but on some level I knew that there was no
clear patch of sky just around the corner. I knew it was
never going to be right.”

He rises for another beer.

“Who am I kidding?” he says, kicking the refrigerator
shut behind him. “I was flying blind. It sucked when she
left. It still sucks.”

We laugh.

“That's why I like Moab,” he says. “I know how it all
works here. I don't need a constant readjustment.”

“McCallister showed up,” I say.

“In Utah?”

“On my doorstep.”

“It's not all that surprising,” he says.

“This time I broke up with him.”

“You're better off,” he says.

I lean my head on his shoulder.

There is scratching outside the door, then the sound
of gnawing. I turn to Ford.

“Porcupines,” he says. “They like the taste of shingles.”

Ford leads me on a tour of the homestead. We walk
behind the trailer and stand at the edge of a moonlit gulch,
listening to the snow-melt stream below. Ford puts his arm
around my waist and we walk together, matching steps.

“On Christmas I went to see this old man who'd had
a stroke and couldn't talk,” I say. “When he fell asleep, I
discovered his darkroom in the backyard with boxes and
boxes of the most beautiful still life photographs. There
were no people in any of them, nothing living, except for
a few shots of his atrophied hand. The pictures made me
so sad, all hidden away.”

Ford stops and looks up for a second.

“I don't think that's sad at all,” he says.

He turns and walks backward, facing me. In a nasally Willie Nelson imitation
he begins to sing.

“
I looked to the stars, tried all of the bars, and I've
nearly gone up in smoke. Now my hand's on the wheel, of
something that's real, and I feel like I'm goin' home.
”

Salt Lake County District Attorney David
Lochman said his office
decided not to file
charges against a man who allegedly attempted to
rape an escort service worker because jurors
would believe the act had been consensual. “You
can't say she was hired and paid big money to go
to a man's motel room to do lewd dances for him
in the nude and then come back and say she was
attacked after she has been paid twice the original
amount,” Lochman said.

—
Salt Lake Tribune

I feel like I owe it to Mohammed to resign face-to-face, so when I return
from Moab, I drive over to Premier.

The office is as it always is: dim, faintly smelling of
coconut oil from the tanning closet and the artificially
floral after-scent of the big purple candle. Kendra is on
the phone, reciting her well-rehearsed, flirtatious pitch
while she reads her horoscope in
Glamour
. It's only 10:30
in the morning but she sets up some new girl whose name
I don't recognize for a date at Little America. Kendra's eyes
widen at the sight of me and she waves with one of her
red-taloned fingernails.

“I thought we'd seen the last of you,” she says when
she hangs up.

“Where's Mohammed?”

“Next door,” she says. “So is that it for you, Roxanne?”
Kendra asks.

“Yeah, I think so,” I say.

Although the rug store appears closed down—it
doesn't even have a sign—the door is open and the bell
rings as I enter. The square room is filled with thigh-high
stacks of Oriental carpets in various sizes, lushly colored
and intricately patterned. I want to bite into the cardamom browns, the honey golds, the berry-stained crimsons. I feel tradition and artistry all around. I lift up a
corner of a rug, only to find the next one just as impressive. I can't believe I've never bothered to come in here
before. I had no idea of the bounty.

I hear the swish of Mohammed's suit before I see him.

“May I help you?” he asks in an obsequious tone. “Oh.
It is you.”

“Hi,” I say.

“So,” he says.

“I guess you figured out that I quit.”

He picks at a thread on the edge of a rug. “Yes, well.
You are not the first.”

“Did you see the paper today? What the D.A. said?”

“I do not want to talk about this,” he says. “I am tired,
you know? I am thinking about getting out of the business
altogether.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“I am not doing something right. It is more
headaches, less money, all the time.”

“You know what I think?” I ask.

“I do not believe I have a choice in that matter.”

“You have an untapped gold mine right here,” I say,
patting a stack of rugs.

“It loses me money too,” he says.

“Because your visibility is bad, you don't advertise,
and you're running back and forth so much, even your
hours of operation are spotty. I had no idea what you had
here and I've been only one door away.”

“Well,” he says. “What would you propose?”

“Why not concentrate your efforts. Spruce up your
image, get a Web site. Really make a go of it,” I say.

“Hm,” he says. “I will think about this.”

His cell phone rings and he has a quick conversation
in Arabic. He gets up and heads toward the back. But then
he stops.

“You know what my motto is?” he asks.

“I can't begin to imagine.”

“You cannot always be happy, but you can always fill
your eye with beauty.”

I think of the photographs of the tree stump, the egg,
the work boot.

“I stole it from George Hamilton,” he says.

“The tan guy?”

“The same.
Love at First Bite
was the first movie I saw
in America. I have been a big fan ever since.”

A postcard arrives today from Ember from Telluride,
Colorado. “We got a little sidetracked,” it says, “but
heading up to Portland soon. Then Spain and olé, baby!”

When I was in Moab, Ford told me that when Ember
was eight and living in a shabby apartment in Milwaukee,
she and her brothers had a plan to take a raft down the
river and sail away. So they saved all the change they
could, stole some, filched from their father's pants—until
they had amassed the twelve dollars for a mail-order
inflatable raft with oars. Her mother had been gone for
days on a bender and her father was out scrounging for
work, so Ember waited for the mailman every day until
the package arrived. The kids took turns blowing it up,
and then on an overcast summer day, the five of them—
the oldest only ten—set out for the river. They slid down
a trash-strewn bank, holding the little red and yellow boat
above their heads, before getting in the water.

They flowed with glee along with the current. Even
though none of them could swim, Ember said she wasn't
scared. At first no one noticed the bobbing raft with five
children in the middle of an industrial river. But soon
people were lined up along the bank, pointing in horror
as the kids careened ever closer to the drop-off they had
no idea existed. It was only when a helicopter arrived
above them and ordered them to hold on to the line did
they suspect they might be in some trouble.

The phone rings and it's Kendra.

“I know you said you aren't going out anymore but I
have this guy who's insistent on not seeing anyone but you
and I thought I'd at least ask. It's Scott, that one you all say
is hot.”

It gives me pause to imagine meeting Scott over
coffee, coming together like old friends. Flirting. A first
date and a last date. A bit of cinematic symmetry.

“I don't think so,” I say. “Tell him I moved away or got
married or something. Or whatever. Tell him what you
want.”

In September 1857, in a meadow in southwestern
Utah, a militia of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints attacked a wagon train of Arkansas families bound
for California. After a five-day siege, the militia persuaded
the families to surrender under a flag of truce and pledge
of safe passage. Then the Mormons slaughtered 140 men,
women, and children. Only 17 children under the age of
eight—the age of innocence in the Mormon faith—were
spared. The church first blamed the massacre on the
Paiute Indians, then, as evidence mounted, on a Mormon
zealot and militia member who was also the adopted son
of the prophet Brigham Young.

“But of course it was church leaders who ordered the
massacre,” Ralf says. “The poor bastards thought they
were doing God's work by ridding the world of infidels.”

I ran into Ralf this morning in the Coffee Garden for
the first time since our winter picnic, and now, over biscuits and gravy at Ruth's, he and his purple-haired girlfriend Luna are fervently explaining to me their campaign
to get the church to own up to its past.

“Mormons are fanatical documenters of history. They
like to say there's a record of everything. So of course they
know,” he says.

“The church refuses to admit LDS leaders had anything to do with the massacre,” Luna says.“And without any
attempt to atone for it, it's a history built on dishonesty.”

“We're trying to set things right, even if it's 150 years
late,” Ralf says.

“My band does a song about it,” Luna says. “You
should come to our next show and hear it.”

“I'd like that,” I say.

Their affinity for each other is bright and heartening.

“We're going down to Moab in a couple weeks to visit
Ford,” Ralf says. “I'm trying to convince him to come up
to do this job with me in Murray that starts pretty soon.
It'll be cake. Just painting. And it's inside.”

I laugh.“It'll be just like old times.”

“Something like that,” he says.

Luna rests her ring-laden hand on Ralf 's forearm.

“Ralf and I were in the same ward as kids. Same
church and everything. Then I saw him a couple of
months ago for the first time in like fifteen years. He looks
the same as he did when he was twelve,” she says.

“You know how people say things happen for a
reason?” Ralf asks. “That used to really bug me because
what they're really saying is there is a “good” and God-sanctioned reason for bad things to happen, and that reason is
necessarily okay because it's part of God's grand plan.
Anyway. After finding Luna, I'm not annoyed anymore.”

“How come?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Because I'm happy.”

Jezebel disappeared. It took a while before anyone
believed it. The first few shifts she missed at work and the
unanswered phone messages were nothing new for her, so
no one thought much of it. Finally Nikyla went by her
apartment and there was some old man living there who
said he'd just moved in. When Nikyla found the landlord
he said Miss Smith had owed three months in rent and
she had had an illegal dog so he finally had the locks
changed. But it didn't really matter, he said, because he
never saw her again anyway.

It happens all the time in this business, girls just
vanish without a word. There was never a good-bye or an
explanation from Jezebel. Now there is just a void. Nikyla
thinks she ran off to L.A. with some guy she was sent on
a date with.

I look for Jezebel while I'm walking around the city
even though I know it's futile. I hope she didn't latch onto
something or someone worse. It's amazing to me that
vibrant and girlish Jezebel could be lying in a morgue
drawer and I would never know. Then again, she could be
on a beach somewhere, still working on her tan, still contemplating her rise to stardom, as her boyfriend waves to
her from atop a surfboard and Albee frolics in the sand.

I thought escorting would get me closer to the bottom
of real life. But as Nikyla said, “It is what it is. People with
people. It's nothing to feel bad about. Even if it's something we'll never do again.”