Everything (20 page)

* * *

At the end of the gravel lane was simply an end; it led to nothing but dead rabbits, cactuses and car parts. He saw her skirt a hundred yards ahead, blue with orange and yellow bands. Morning sun, but he could feel it through the cloth of his hat, unblinking, relentless. Just this far inland and it was like the ocean didn’t exist, no sign or scent of it, the red dirt baked into hard piles and things that looked like rabbit castings, dried into lumpy tubes. A half-built house of concrete block. A Monte Carlo up on blocks. RL thought of the oceanside resorts with their white flags flying and their blue water and rustling palms and knew it was unreal, a show put on for the tourists. But this did not feel any more real, skeletal, unfinished … like backstage at Disneyland, where he had been once with his high-school band, the dirt and grease and uncollected garbage, cartoon rabbits walking around sweating with their big heads held under their arms …

He was almost sure it was her. A blur of bright movement.

The sun flattened all of it into a white picture, desert, sky, spiky thorn plants with red flags of flower at the top. Hard country, alkali white. You could die here. He felt them leave the known world, the last half-empty street, Tecate can, pile of construction debris, forlorn lawn mower. Here was simple, bright and hot. He lost her in and out of the creosote bushes but found her bright skirt again. She never looked back. He never called to her.

RL looked back behind him after a few minutes and saw: nothing, more of the same, open desert and bright sun. He wondered if they were lost.

Betsy kept walking a mile or two.

* * *

You could die here, RL thought, and nobody would know. Maybe they would see the vultures and come looking. Not even ten o’clock in the morning and already all the desert creatures slept down in their holes, in the cool deep dirt or the shade deep under a rock pile. Here where he had no business. No rights in this matter at all.

He realized then that he had not seen her for a few minutes. Betsy had vanished from his sight. RL stopped, and trained his eyes on the spot where he had last seen her, as much as he could tell, but there was nothing. Perhaps he was wrong, a little to the left or to the right. Maybe she had stopped and he hadn’t noticed. Maybe RL had caught up to her somehow, or maybe she was even behind him, he had slipped past her, he had turned the wrong way.

When he looked back there was nothing, empty desert and sun.

By the time he had swung his gaze across the whole of the desert, he was lost. Which way was anywhere? A flat mouse-colored hill rose on the horizon but he had not noticed it before, and had no idea whether it was north or south, ocean or inland. He wished sincerely that he had paid a little more attention.

He had nothing with him that might help: no water, no shade, no cell phone.

Burned clean by the sun. This was what she was after, he understood now: the nearness and the dazzle of death, the flat white light. To be lost, let go. He understood water, how it worked and how it went. This place said nothing to him. He stood in his ridiculous clothes, his nylon and polyester, his flaps and buckles, and understood
how little it could help him now. Luck would help. Luck and maybe a helping hand. Sunday morning. He stood alone in the amplifying sun and thought: I could do this, I could do that. No way to turn that was better than any other.

His luck was not his to decide. The knowledge of this spilled into him like light, like grace. It was no longer his to do or decide.

This was what she was after, he understood now.

He came upon her kneeling in a clearing of round gray pebbles. Her eyes were closed and her hands pressed together in front of her mouth so that she breathed her own breath. It would hurt to kneel on that ground. She would feel cactus thorns, rocks, goatheads. She would suffer, which, he imagined, was the point. RL stopped moving, said nothing. He felt a kind of golden light coming off her, not just a reflection of the sun but her own light, it was hard to say. It was hard to see her, somehow. He was not worried about his own survival in that moment or hers, either. Something else was going on. He didn’t need to understand. As his eyes cleared into the bright dizzying light he saw that behind her praying hands—he was almost sure—Betsy was smiling.

A hot dry wind blew through the creosote branches and ocotillos, making a lonely noise.

She was smiling, he was sure of it. Her eyes were still closed tightly. Not the social smile, the one for others—not the picture-taking smile—but the happiness inside that she couldn’t keep off her face. Girl with an ice cream cone. Girl with pet. Girl in love. RL felt an answering joy inside his chest. He could not explain it. He did not try. He felt her like sunlight.

* * *

After a while—later he would try to feel how long, and he wouldn’t be able to say—she opened her eyes, but she had known all along that he was there. No surprise. She had been expecting him.

All better now, she said.

Hurt, Howard thinks
. Drunk and drunk again and not drunk yet.

Lucky Strike casino, eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning, the twenty-seven televisions racketing on about football and Howard thinks of Robert Mitchum in a white T-shirt, smoking an unfiltered cigarette, hurt.

That’s what men do, Howard thinks. Take it. You don’t have to like it but you do have to take it. Mitchum went to jail for it. The hurting kind. He tried to love her, he did! But she didn’t like his style. Wanted to make an asshole out of him. Wanted Howard to play the villain. Well, that was all right, he guessed, a lot of other women out there that God made, a lot of other fish in the sea. Still, she was a fine one. If she only knew what a good man looked like.
She’d be sorry one of these good old days, but Howard would be long gone. He wasn’t going to wait around for her to realize.

In the long back hallway, on his way to take a leak, Howard watches the sunlight shine onto the filthy linoleum and thinks of a meadow in May, a meadow with horses and women in it.

Individual particles of dust float through the light. Individual bits of filth on the black floor.

He closes his eyes, standing at the urinal, and thinks of spring sunlight, the horses living in their bodies, running for joy, the arrowleaf balsamroot in yellow flower. Howard himself astride a fast horse, racing for the far green hills. The mountains white above with snow.

When he opens his eyes and looks down, there is blood in the urinal. He closes his eyes again. He doesn’t want to see. Another chapter.

American, beautiful, airborne
, the Mexicana jet airliner (old, tired, a dent in the side by the passenger door) swoops south into the bluest sky and along the coast and then the long, slow turn out over the ocean, a simple landscape of blue-green water and greenest land cut with red-dirt roads and between land and water a thin white ribbon of sand …. It was good, it was beautiful, that thrust and power, that American wallet that solved all the problems. Betsy wants to go home? No problemo, just lay down the wallet, the problems melt and disappear.

He could make out the palms as they curved out over the water but he lost them as they climbed, smaller and gone and only the water below and the fierce tropical sunlight glinting off the bare wings. Speed and power and shine, the pleasant kick back into the seat as the pilot accelerated up into the sky. These Mexican pilots,
RL had to hand it to them: no pause at the end of the runway, no letup in the throttle, just pure noise and thrust. Go and go.

I’m sorry, Betsy said again.

Don’t worry about it, RL said again.

When would the drinks cart come? Oh, but here she was already, rattling down the aisle with the seat belt sign barely off and the land still particularized below, the cars and trees and tile-roofed houses like little model railroad sets …. If only, RL thought: this feeling of control, of looking at life from high above, the master, the only slightly interested … He ordered a gin and tonic, which was free, which made him feel that he would only fly Mexican airlines from here on out.

I knew, Betsy said. All at once I knew.

She was telling her story to herself again. Which was basically fine with RL, he didn’t have an argument with her, no hurt feelings though sometimes he did wonder if he had ever been in the room at all or whether it had just been the Betsy and Betsy show all along.

Wings to fly, RL thought. He had checked the Internet in the business center off the hotel lobby and it was twelve degrees at home, the rivers frozen shut, the little birds freezing out of the trees, the deer coming down off the mountain to graze the flower beds. His life made no sense to him. A life of ease and plenty, why not? He had his father’s money in the bank, a few million, RL had never touched it but made his own. Dad the bastard, RL thought. His mother weeping in the kitchen. But they were both dead now and unless RL was much, much wrong it would not matter to either
of them. RL could spend his father’s money on anything he wanted and not betray his mother. The only time he ever touched that money was to keep his mother in assisted living, there at the end, which gave him a feeling of pride mixed with a little bad feeling of revenge. The older he got, the more he missed them. Both of them.

I had to see my kids, Betsy said. I knew it all at once.

Well, that’s good, RL said again. I hope you’re right.

I am, she said. I just woke up and thought, I am well. Through and through I am well. You believe me.

RL squeezed the last of his lime into his drink, looking down into the icy blue depths of gin. In fact he thought she was crazy. But that didn’t mean she was wrong.

You know things I don’t, he said.

That’s right.

I hope you’re right, is all.

She took his hand on the armrest between them and gave it a good squeeze. Her hands were long and fine but years of rough work had made them strong.

You’ve been good to me, she said. I’ll always love you for that. But you have to believe me.

Monday morning on her knees
again in the incense dark of the church. Her and a bunch of old women. Which June would look like to anybody who even bothered to notice her, another boring story in practical shoes. She would never have her own children. June would never matter. A winter ice-rain spattered against the stained glass.

Layla loved her, she was almost sure. Maybe that was it. Maybe neither one of them could take the heat and press of it, the phantom obligations of love. She couldn’t think of Layla now: alone, the thing inside her. Not just the baby but this whole other self, growing out of the wreckage of the old … June kept thinking that she would just pick herself up and go on with her life, the way she always had. She was a brave person when she had to be—she had
learned that about herself—she could endure. She could suffer. Not a great talent to have. She would rather be able to sing.

And look at her now, sitting in church and thinking about herself. Always herself. Always the bridesmaid.

Jesus floated around her head like some kind of invisible cloud, intangible, just out of reach. June settled herself and pressed her palms together and her lips together and put her shoulders into it, this prayer of hers, but she couldn’t touch anything. Nothing solid. Just wishes and hopes, stories and pictures, the sacred bleeding heart and the Virgin assumed whole and torpedo-shaped into Heaven. And June, the non-virgin non-birth.
Barren
, is what the Bible would call her, barren among women. The fruit of thy womb.

This was getting her nowhere.

She didn’t have to work until the next day. No particular place to go.

But this was still getting her nowhere, the dark that wouldn’t answer, the great uncommunicative cloud of Jesus …. June was restless, restless. She felt like she needed to find some orphan somewhere, something, anything that needed taken care of. Some flightless baby bird. She zipped herself into her fleece jacket. This is June at forty-nine: a Polarfleece beret, a fuzzy brick-colored polyester jacket with fake Mayan trim, wool stockings and brown comfortable shoes. Everything fits into her little bag: her cell phone, wallet, the various medications she must take. She fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. A couple of pieces missing.

* * *

Outside, gray and nowhere. She wished just once that she could hear Taylor play his trombone again.

She’s staying at the downtown Holiday Inn for now, until she can find a place. Her things are scattered where she left them, at Howard’s, at the ministorage, in RL’s garage. She has an appointment with a financial adviser at three o’clock to talk about what to do with all her money. As of today, she has three million two hundred and thirty thousand dollars in her checking account, which seems not quite right. Maybe she should buy a car or two. A nice little neighborhood to call her own. She doesn’t cry, June doesn’t, but if she did, this would be the morning for it.

Maybe she will take herself to lunch.

There’s nothing for her on this side of the river, anyway, and so she starts back downtown again, hopscotching through the alleys in the half rain. These neighborhoods were old and still mostly cheap, polite from the front—all chain-link lawns and tidy mailboxes—but the back alleys were full of personality, canoes and derelict Bonnevilles, woodpiles, curious malamutes, men smoking in their underwear. The rain filled the puddles, sparkled on the lawn mowers and windows. Last year’s gardens sat abandoned and brown in tidy rows, waiting for planting, and somewhere here (maybe in the next block) was an amazing wishing well of concrete with bits of shattered dinner plates set in to decorate, a rooster painted on one of them that had been part of her grandmother’s china set, a little bit of her set in concrete forever, or till the weather faded it to nothing ….

A little dog looked back at her from the block ahead. Not that little but long and low. Not a wiener dog exactly but furry, alert. It
stood sideways across the alley and pointed its big radar ears at her, mouth a little open, eyes bright.