Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (23 page)

“Why?” Maya said.

“Rick. Rick is the car-dealership brother. He had them engrave a heart on the stone, and inside it, ‘Mother.' Jesse did it—he's a stonemason. And accessory. Jesse's the second. One night I'll have too much to drink and go in there and deface the thing. What can you make out of ‘Mother'? Other.”

“This coffee is disgusting,” Maya said.

“Come on, you don't want any of that,” Marion said. He pulled a thermos from a pocket of his coat and poured some into a new cup from the tray. “The other middle brother made out the best. He farms coffee beans on a shady hill in Guatemala. Now you know every one of us.”

Maya smiled weakly. She felt soldered to her seat, by her fatigue and his talking. Working herself loose from the heavy fingers of both, she made herself slip off the stool—it was like another woman doing it, her legs were like stone—and laid her palm into the door of the bathroom.

“It turned into number two!” Max shouted from within. They all laughed at the counter, the girls looking up from the cell phone. Maya laughed, too, enjoying the moment—then wondered if they were embarrassing Max. When the man, Marion, laughed, the balefulness went from his eyes.

Maya returned to the counter. The diner clamored around them with the universal sound of forks on plates, water pouring into glasses, a laugh from one of the booths. Was it the surrounding emptiness that explained the unfamiliarly convivial feeling of the restaurant despite its godforsaken appearance—a huddling amity, exiles roped together on a crevasse at the edge of the world? She inhaled the thick aroma of the coffee; just the fog of it was tantalizing: leaves, a wood, autumn.

Marion waved his hands. “It isn't hot anymore.”

“I walked away for a second,” Maya said, rolling her eyes.

“Hot,” Marion said. He took her cup for himself, and poured her a new one.

Maya sipped at the coffee. It brought her closer to sleep but loosened the strain in her neck. On the other side of their father, Alma and Celia stared rhapsodically at a cell phone. They were as square-shouldered as their father was lean. She imagined their mother in some kind of heavy robe that hid the ample folds of her figure.

“Max is adopted,” Maya said. She bolted upright. Her heart started pounding, lifting her fatigue. She looked over her shoulder: Max was still in the bathroom. She clenched her jaw to try to get some focus into her face. She was really letting herself get away from herself.

“Sometimes, I think they're adopted,” Marion said, bending his head toward his daughters.

“You're having breakfast with your daughters, I would say that's a triumph,” Maya said diplomatically, wishing to return the conversation to comprehensible ground.

“They're having breakfast with their cell phone,” he said. “I'm having breakfast with you.”

The bathroom door swung open, and Max stepped out. How especially frail he looked in the fierce light pouring in from the large windows. The light was all but coming through him. She set her coffee down on the counter.

“Finish your coffee,” Marion said. “We'll get some juice for—Max.”

“We're . . .”—momentarily Maya struggled with the tense—“we're being waited for.”

Marion nodded. “I see.”

“Mama?” Max said.

“Just a second, honey,” she said. “This man will tell us about a campground where we can stay tonight.” She tried to sound casual, but her ears were still ringing with the unnecessary disclosure she had made a moment before. She should have rushed out of the diner—Marion didn't know that Max didn't know and could say something carelessly. She tried to collect herself—for the tenth time in ten minutes. She turned to Marion. “I don't know where we are,” she said. She felt the fright she had given herself in her body: Her tiny breasts swelled; her belly felt soft; her heart was beating.

Marion moved his eyes from Max to his mother, and considered her with that balefulness. “In a diner outside Badlands National Park. If you want to camp, there's just one place. You go down 240 until it splits off. You'll have gone past the park. But you stay on the road—it's just 377 then. You can't miss it.”

She thanked him and stood. She stood longer than she needed to. “Will you tell your brother how good a coffee he makes?”

“Enjoy this magnificent country,” Marion said.

+

Alex was on the phone. She could tell from across the road that he was speaking with his parents because he was speaking with extra volume. Was he reporting to them what had happened? “Already, Maya has acquainted herself with the law,” she imagined
him saying. Her temples were aflame. She clutched Max's hand so hard that he squirmed. She didn't trust herself, crossing the road.

Alex paced the shoulder, as if he was in their living room. He could not sit and speak on the telephone at the same time. How tiny he looked splashed against the ridgeline, like an insect parading down its broad brown windshield. Only a little larger than the oblong white birds, which continued to leap as if they never lost hunger. The ridgeline looked as if it had grown in the warming rays of the sun, a sun-shower mushroom of rimrock and scree.

The sun was burning strongly and the stinging chill of early morning had gone. Maya knelt before Max and yanked off his jacket. The zipper wouldn't give and she was too violent with it. The sun felt good on her face, and she lost a moment staring up at the sky, her eyes squinting at the light, Max's jacket half off.

“What do you see, Mama?” he said.

“I bet you're hungry,” she said. “We should have gotten you something inside.” She wondered whether she could go back in. She could leave both of them in the Escape while she went in to get takeout.

“Who was that man?” Max said.

Maya hesitated. “He was the coffee man. He comes to the diners to give them their coffee.”

“When will I be allowed to drink coffee?”

“When you go to college.”

“I don't want to go to college.”

“Oh, yeah?” she rustled his hair. “What do you know about it? Go say hello to your grandmother and grandfather.”

He turned to walk toward his father, but she held him. “Hold on. I'm sorry. That wasn't the coffee man.”

“Who was it?”

“Did you get scared in the police car?”

Max shook his head.

“I'm sorry. I made a bad decision. Sometimes I do that. I'm sorry. Okay?”

“It's fine,” Max said. “I wasn't scared. Who was that man?”

Maya laughed sorrowfully. “That was a new friend. Like Oliver is for you. Do you miss Oliver?”

“He borrowed three books.”

“Is he the kind of person who returns the things that you loan him?”

“I don't know,” Max shrugged. “I've never done it before.”

“Why did you agree this time?”

“I thought I would miss him.”

Maya bit her lip. “You're a very good friend to him. And he to you.”

“How do you know if someone is a good friend?” Max said.

“A friend is if you feel good about them in your soul.”

“What's a soul?” Max said.

Maya laughed and nearly let a tear fall. She took his ears in her hands and rubbed them like wishbones. “A soul is that part of you . . . It's that part of you where you're the most honest about yourself. It's always the truth in your soul. Does that make sense?”

“Am I honest?”

“You're more honest than anyone I know.”

She let him go. She circled the SUV until she was out of Max and Alex's sight, slipped to the ground, and leaned against its sturdy black frame. She stared up at the blinding light until it started tears again. Here were reasons for a trip far from home in a big car: The sun was strong enough to set off tears in her eyes, the Escape large enough to conceal her as they fell to the ground.

The Rubins drove past Badlands National Park/Pennington County Campground even though the sign advertising it was large and clear—too clear against the burnt-gray nothingness that it fronted. They drove past in a unanimous wish—so rare for them unanimity these days; perhaps they wished to savor it—for the campground to turn out to be some place other than the fenced-off patch of hard ground to which they reluctantly returned. The hard-baked pan of the plot was rejected even by plants. They gazed longingly at a rickety-looking motel off on a ridge—it seemed grand. The campground fence was strung with warnings against rattlesnakes, exhortations to conserve water, regulations regarding campfires, the opening and closing hours of a little shed on the edge of the lot that said
OFFICE
. How could a place of so few amenities require so many regulations? The Americans were regulated even when practicing wildness. In Kiev, Maya and her schoolmates had crept into the Alexeyevsky Theater at night because the city did not bother to keep it locked. They acted out their favorite film scenes on stage and drank moonshine in the aisles. They always deposited a bottle with the old watchman so that he would be amiably distracted. They did clean up when they were done—they weren't savages.

On exiting the Escape, Maya was buoyed a little by the dry, sweet, grassy air. Where was the grass? She could see only puckered gray stone—she thought of small elephants. The day was enjoying its best heat at this elevation at this time of year; Maya turned her face up and closed her eyes, letting the light wind whip her hair. Now it carried the sound of rustling grass, and again she looked
around, as if she had heard speech in an empty room. Perhaps neither humbleness of imagination nor low funds were responsible for the bare facilities; perhaps they were meant to accentuate the views that lay open in every direction. The terrain looked like a cardiogram—the stone was beating healthy and sound. She remembered her husband and son; they were off to the side of the small dirt parking lot, waiting for her. She called out to Alex to set up the tent while she and Max registered. “Which one?” Alex said, pointing at the numbered campsites. “Any one,” she said and, after Max joined her, went into the office.

Something had expired and then expired again in the low-ceilinged front room of the shed. Behind the wood partition, a red-faced man in a check shirt and suspenders was clutching a telephone and listening loudly to the senselessness on the other end of the line. Maya had been enlarged by the landscape, he by elk sausage in gravy: mother and child could fit inside of him twice. A moth the size of Maya's fist banged around a desk lamp, on despite the blasted severity of the light outside. Other insects had tattered the lampshade into a rag that barely held on to the harp.

“Well, Carla, your piss don't smell like gingersnaps, either,” he yelled and slammed down the phone. Its tinnitic echo rang through the stale air of the office. Maya smelled gasoline, dried meat, wet straw. The attendant flexed a pair of porcine ears. A nameplate identified him as Wilfred Shade. “How can I help you?” he sighed. He held up a palm the size of Maya's head.“I'm sorry, little fellow. Pardon my language.”

“Is piss the same as pee?” Max said.

The adults smiled. “We're not laughing at you, honey,” Maya said. “Come here.”

“There's two ways of saying things,” Wilfred Shade said. “After you walk out of here, you could say: ‘Mr. Shade, he was big.' Or: ‘Mr. Shade's fat.' What would you say?”

Max looked up at his mother. “We would call Mr. Shade big, honey,” Maya said.

“Your mom is nice, see,” Wilfred said. He pushed a paper at Maya. “Fill this out.” He retreated into the back office, but a moment later, his big head emerged. “You want an Oreo, either of you?” he said.

“Here is the one boy in the world who doesn't like sweets,” Maya said.

“You and I part ways there,” Wilfred said, and disappeared. Then his head popped out again. “I've got graham crackers. Dieter's delight.”

Maya smiled wanly and thanked him, and now the attendant vanished for good.

“Max?” Maya looked down at her son. “Are you all right? You haven't said much. Did something upset you?”

“Why did you cry?”

“When?”

“You went around the car and cried.”

“No, no. I had something in my eye. And then the sun here is so strong. I started tearing up. But I'm fine, honey—fine. Look at me—I'm laughing.”

“Why did we come here?” he said.

“We're on vacation, sweetheart. You've never really been on vacation with your mama.”

“If we're on vacation, why are you crying?”

Maya heard the television go on in the back office. Through the doorway, Wilfred was breathing heavily into a half-bitten Oreo. Was he trying to give her privacy? But she did not care about being overheard. As if feeling her stare on him, Wilfred turned back to look at her. “What I do,” he said, “is I bite and then count. To twenty-five, and sometimes to fifty, if I can manage it. This way I eat five instead of the whole pack.”

“You look great,” Maya said.

“Ho-ho-ho,” Wilfred said, and turned back to the television.

Maya crouched in front of her son.“Do you know what, Maxie? It's okay to cry sometimes. Good, actually. We've got laughs inside
us, but cries, too. And they both have to come out. Sometimes, they come out at the wrong moments. They don't listen like that.”

“It's strange to miss school.”

“I have the one son who doesn't like Oreos but likes school.”

Max shrugged and puffed out his mouth.

“I love this about you,” she said. “Do you know that? I do. I don't want you to be any other way.”

“I believe you.” Max nodded.

“We're going to see how Papa is doing with the tent, and then we'll go take a walk. It's beautiful here, don't you think?”

Max shrugged.

“You don't think so? Aren't you excited you'll have a tent to sleep in again? I made Papa do it so you would be happy.”

“The ground is hard,” he said. “It's softer at home on the lawn.”

“Just give it a shot—please. I've been looking forward to being away with you for so long. Just me, you, and Papa. We love Grandma and Grandpa, but just us three this one time.”

“Okay,” Max said. “I will.”

Maya and Max returned outdoors to find husband and father lost in the embrace of a giant tent that billowed in the strong wind like the sail of a boat. No sooner would Alex slide a stake through one side of the piping than the opposite would shoot out into the next camping plot over, where, luckily, there was no one to impale. Maya and Max walked over. Alex asked why Maya had bought a tent when they already had one, Max's. If it was a purchase in error, why couldn't it, at least, be a good one? She had bought not a tent but a barracks for a small army. The same army was needed to mount it. Alex's monologue was halted by the arrival of a strong gust of wind. The bottom edge of the tent furled up, Alex lost his footing, and Maya and Max were soon gazing on him plastered across the hardpan, arms and legs splayed. It was only the weight of Alex's fallen self that kept the tent from flying off with the wind.

Max moved off toward a post with a coil of rope tied around it. One decorated the edge of every campsite—it was the border.
Max unwound the rope, looping one end over the post and the other through an opening at the crown of the tent. This gave the operation the traction it needed. Maya and Alex watched their son move around the tent, staking poles into the hardpan, which, now shimmied properly, held the poles with unvarying force. Finally, it was impossible to continue without Alex giving up his position, and he crawled off the tent. Muttering, he walked off to wash his hands. Indeed, Maya had made an error—the tent was much too big for three. But it was beautiful, too, warlike and protective at once, a dryland ship awaiting assignment.

+

“Call me Rose, call me Ranger Rose, call me Ranger Holliver. But don't call me ‘lady,' don't call me ‘yo,' and no ‘hey there's, okay? Mom Holliver did not sit with a name-omen book for three days for no reason.” The retirees filling out the noon naturalist walk chuckled. Maya gripped Max's hand. Alex had insisted they go alone. He would spend time with the map, designing the shortest route to Adelaide, Montana. Maya felt a wave of futility. On a weekday in late October, when the adult world was at work, she was in an arid moonscape with a child and ten old people in the downswing of their lives. She felt at once undeservedly idle and frantic to no purpose.

“Late-season groups are my favorite,” Rose Holliver said. “This is the time to see it.” Her chest was shapeless in a many-pocketed worsted forest-green shirt, her belly hemmed in by coarse gray slacks with black piping. The strap from her broad-brimmed gray hat accentuated the downy ampleness of her chin, the cinch making Maya think of horses and bits. Where did Rose Holliver come upon love in this emptiness? Or was there a man who joined her in the modest trailer they shared in a residential development nearby after his own day working at something for the national park? They fried hamburgers, on special nights they had merlot from the store. They had a half collie that had appeared one day
and had been seduced into staying by leftover hamburger bits. In the evenings they watched the same television shows that Alex and Eugene watched, and they even paid a fee to the neighborhood association for electricity and water. Was their life so different? What difference did location make if they got along and liked the same things—she fried; he washed up after they finished. Maya had come ready to find savages, desperate characters, the poor, but there was no savagery. It was nice between Rose and (Trent? Charlie?), it was close, the shaggy collie watching the two lovers until they stopped and had a laugh over the dog's watching. They didn't smoke after sex. They didn't have children, and probably wouldn't. (Whereas Maya was forty-two but looked thirty-two, Rose looked forty-two but was thirty-two: she was the fertile one.) They had the pup. They called him Anna. Like Santa Anna, not like a girl.

Rose was giving out information about the Badlands: It looked like hopeless rock, but two-thirds was actually grass prairie. Maya was gratified by the information: It answered her earlier question. “You could run a herd of cattle on here if you wanted,” Rose said. Maya pulsed Max's hand. They were on a mile-long boardwalk that led from the visitor center to an overlook down on a hundred-mile ridge of striated stone that ran all the way into Nebraska. Nebraska! To Maya, the word was as exotic as Neptune, and yet Maya stood within sight of it. Actually faced, it seemed unfamiliar and ordinary all at once.

Max looked up at Maya. “Grass, Max,” Maya said, and nodded encouragingly. But he gave no reaction.

Rose was counting on her fingers, the thumbs male in their thickness: “Some of the last wildflowers you'll see before we get this freeze in the next couple of days: prickly pear, prairie coneflower, needle and thread, sideoats grama . . .”

After the dim glass cases of the visitor center, the wood-etched signage around the park, and the shit-brown bathroom stalls that followed their progress down the boardwalk, the names of the
grasses were beautiful. Sideoats grama sounded like a Negro jazz act. Maya wanted to know who got to name them. Even though the seniors were regularly interrupting the lecture, calling out “Ranger Holliver?” with happy compliance, Maya was too shy to raise her hand. Max might know, she thought, but he was refusing to become involved.

Rose was on to the animal life. Two small birds, black knobby heads and torsos like white eggs, were bouncing on the upper rail of the fence separating the visitors from the wilderness. “Little tuxedoes they've got on,” Rose said. The birds had a hot-turquoise cummerbund on each flank—nature's bid for grace and surprise amid the universe's black-and-white plodding. “Who can tell me who these little guys are?” Rose said. “Your prize is a refund on your tour ticket.” The retirees grumbled with laughter—the tour was free. Maya knelt in front of Max: “Max, honey, do you know what kind of bird that is?” Someone said butcher-bird. No, a flycatcher. “It's just a magpie,” he whispered. Maya leaped to her feet. “We know!” she exclaimed. The retirees swiveled and gazed admiringly down on the young mother with the fair-haired boy. “Now this apple
did
fall far from the tree,” a tall man with watery eyes said. Chuckles murmured through the group. “I'd give a dollar to be your age, young naturalist. The bottom dollar.”

Maya, stung by the first comment, was placated by the second. “Tell them, honey,” Maya said, looking down at Max. But her son stepped a half foot behind her and dropped her hand. Rose and the retirees waited. “Max,” Maya hissed. “Magpie.” He turned and faced away from the group. Maya colored. She looked back at the seniors and swallowed. “We're shy today,” she said apologetically, wondering if her accent was coming through. What had seemed unimpeachable emerging from Max's mouth felt like an embarrassing guess from her own. “Magpie?”

“You got it,” Rose said. The gallery went up in cheers. “Sometimes the simple answer's the right one, folks, that was the lesson on that one,” Rose said, and the retirees banged their walking
sticks on the boardwalk in agreement as they touched off again, play in the boards after a summer's use.

Maya knelt again and took Max by the shoulders. “Max, what's going on? Are you warm? Cold?” She touched his forehead.

“Where's Papa?” he said.

“Papa's with the map. Do you want to go back? I can try to get him on the cell phone.”

“When we go on vacation, we go to the beach. This isn't vacation.”

“When your dad and grandma and grandpa go on vacation, you go to the beach,” Maya said. “I like different places to go on vacation. When you grow up, you can choose your own. Don't you like it?” She motioned toward the outcroppings of striped sandstone before them, now looking like a horse's head, now a marzipan cookie, now a hand clasping a cane. How rapidly the otherworldly magnificence of the sight ceased to seem otherworldly. But it remained magnificent. Maya wondered how such a barren, howling emptiness could fail to fill a watcher with fright; she felt light-headed, though not exactly with fright. Not barren, either—Rose Holliver's mission was to make the group understand that the stony hills teemed with life. You just had to know how to see. Maya marveled at the rookie pleasure she'd taken in the nondescript elevation they'd seen in the morning, an immigrant marveling at the bounty of the corner grocery when the supermarket awaited. She thought to make a game of divining the shapes of the buttes, but her son did not look interested.