Hunters and Gatherers (28 page)

He said, “Good morning, ladies. Sorry it took me so long to slow down. We’re all pretty careful these days. Hell, you could be Thelma and Louise.”

“I hated that movie,” said Martha.

“Glad to hear it,” the trucker said.

“I loved it,” Hegwitha said.

The trucker shook their hands, solemnly. “My name’s T-Bone,” he said.

“A meat-truck driver named T-Bone?” Hegwitha said. “Totally surreal.”

“I’m Martha,” Martha said quickly. “And this is Hegwitha.”

“Good to meet you,” said T-Bone. Then he pulled himself together like a busy doctor who has done the bedside-manner part and now wants to get on with your case.

“What’s the problem?” he inquired, intuiting that Hegwitha was the one to ask.

“I honestly couldn’t tell you.” Hegwitha inhaled, expanding her chest, quasi-military and assault-proof.

T-Bone went over to the van and peered under the hood. What a pleasure, what a relief to have a man take on your car trouble!

“Christ,” he said. “What did your gauges say?”

“I don’t know, it just conked out.” Hegwitha sounded vaguely aggrieved, as if it were T-Bone’s fault.

“Well,” said T-Bone. “You want me to try and start it?”

“We’d appreciate that,” Hegwitha said.

In the time elapsed since Hegwitha last tried to start the motor, the click of the key seemed to have grown tinnier and more unpromising. They both flinched at the sound as they leaned in the van windows, watching T-Bone.

“Dead as a duck,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Where are you girls coming from?”

“Girls?” said Hegwitha.

“Women,” T-Bone said.

“We’ve been staying down the road,” Martha said.

“At the Four Feathers Institute,” Hegwitha added.

Martha hoped he didn’t know what it was. She didn’t want him assuming she was some New Age geek. But how self-involved to imagine that he was thinking about her—or about anything except how to start their van. As T-Bone got out and again looked under the hood, Martha watched his strong back under his bomber jacket.

He said, “Your best shot is if I give you a ride to the nearest garage and they send a tow truck to pick up the van. Hey, this thing has rental plates! You can call the agency, though you know the bastards won’t come across with a nickel. I hope you girls have plastic. These garage guys will skin you alive.” Hegwitha looked alarmed. “I mean, they’ll overcharge you.”

“We’ll take the ride. Thanks.” Hegwitha sighed.

“Come on, it could be worse,” T-Bone said. “I’ve got a thermos of coffee and the new k. d. lang tape.”

“I love k. d. lang,” said Hegwitha.

“I bet you do.” T-Bone reached up and opened the passenger door for them.

Without a word it was decided that Martha would sit next to T-Bone and Hegwitha would get the door. That was what they both wanted, though Hegwitha may not have known it. Let her think that Martha was martyring herself, sitting next to a man.

The interior of the cab was unexpectedly exotic. Cranberry-colored pompons bobbled around the edge of the window. On the dashboard was a tiny magnetized vase of plastic flowers, a silvery miniature mosque, a painting of a white pony with glittery blankets and bridles, and several snapshots in frames.

In the few seconds before T-Bone got in, Hegwitha said, “I’m amazed. I would have thought this guy was strictly
Penthouse
Pet of the Month and Waylon Jennings.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Hegwitha said.

“Be my guest,” said T-Bone.

“What’s that?” Hegwitha pointed her lit cigarette at the mosque.

“Mecca,” he said. “My partners are two Syrian brothers who drive out of Phoenix. Most drivers get to ride around with naked pictures of Madonna. I get the Ayatollah. Though don’t you think that Madonna’s sort of like the Ayatollah?”

“Are you high on something?” Hegwitha asked.

“I wish,” T-Bone said.

Martha inspected the dashboard more closely. Beaming out of one picture frame was a woman with dark eyes and long brown hair. In the crook of each arm she held a girl whose delicate face mirrored her mother’s tidy features and trusting, straight-ahead gaze.

“My wife and kids,” T-Bone said. “By the way, where were you girls going at the crack of dawn?”

“Women.” Hegwitha would keep correcting him for however long it took.

T-Bone grinned at Martha, and, traitorously, she smiled back.

Hegwitha said, “My friend’s daughter ran away. We were looking for her.”

T-Bone’s grin faded. “Jesus, I’m sorry. That’s awful. How old is your daughter?” he asked Martha.

Martha said, “She’s thirteen.”

Pressed against Hegwitha, Martha felt her tense and relax, and knew Hegwitha had meant for him to assume the child was Martha’s. Perhaps it would be easier if they could maintain that fiction without actually having to lie. T-Bone would be more sympathetic, eager to help; it would take less explaining. If Martha said, A friend’s daughter, T-Bone might ask, What friend? and Hegwitha would soon be lecturing him on how male sky-god religion had stamped out Goddess worship.

Already Martha was embarrassed by her time with the Goddess women. She knew that true believers were never ashamed of their faith. And religion would be such a help now—a promise that they’d find Sonoma. She felt her lack of faith so acutely she had to remember she’d never had any, and that this was not the searing pain of recent deprivation but the dull pins and needles amputees feel long after the loss of a limb.

Martha said, “It’s scary. She never ran away before.”

T-Bone gave a low sympathetic whistle and slowly shook his head. Martha was glad that he didn’t instantly convert his pity into a long list of practical steps that he would advise—no, tell—her to take. You could live with a man like this, a man who wasn’t on a personal mission to improve you or demolish you if you were sluggish about improving. Martha envied T-Bone’s wife, though she knew this was a mistake. There were always hidden negatives that one wouldn’t want and shouldn’t envy. The drawbacks in this case were plain: here he was out on the road, while she was stuck at home with the children.

In the pinkish gathering light, anyone could tell that T-Bone was imagining how he would feel if
his
daughter ran away. Martha wanted to say: It’s all right, your children are home with their mom. But it wasn’t all right, nothing was, because Sonoma was missing.

T-Bone grasped Martha’s elbow. Pure comfort streamed along her arm down to the bones of her fingers. There was nothing seductive in his touch, however much Martha would have liked it. It seemed unfair that, after all that had happened, the touch of a man—an attractive man—could steady her so profoundly.

“She’ll come back.” T-Bone hesitated a moment, then said, “My partners would kill me if they knew how many girl hitchhikers I pick up, even though I know it’s a lousy idea—legally, insurancewise. Any one of them could be a time bomb who’ll go nuts and yell rape and get me sent away for life, or fake whiplash and sue the company for a zillion bucks. But I know they’re safer with me than with some psycho. The risk I’m taking is a lot better than their hitching rides with Ted Bundy.”

“The Ted Bundys are out there, all right.” It was the first thing Hegwitha had said in a while.

T-Bone said, “You know it, I know it. But these kids don’t know it. They get in the cab all attitude, like they’re doing me a favor. They’re not going to talk to me, no sir, not some dumb asshole trucker. And it takes them about two seconds to start telling me their whole life story. Half the time I pick them up they’re running away from home. And half the time they’ve given up and are on their way home again.”

Martha said, “I hope we find her and don’t have to wait for her to give up and come back.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” T-Bone said, “how do you plan on finding her?”

Martha looked at Hegwitha. What
was
their plan, exactly? Conveniently, the van had died just as they’d had to decide.

“I don’t know,” Martha told T-Bone, and was as shocked as T-Bone and Hegwitha when she burst into tears.

T-Bone must have meant to pat her on the shoulder, but missed and wound up pawing her neck, clumsy and endearing.

“Raising kids!” He shook his head. “What an impossible job! In our house the worst thing is the bicker bicker. They’d fight over a dead snake if that’s all there was to fight about. But that’s not really the worst thing. The worst thing is wanting to protect them and never knowing if you can keep them safe or even what makes them happy.”

Martha couldn’t believe it. She and Hegwitha had driven into the desert and broken down and flashed their lights and managed to conjure up the totally reconstructed male, an evolved being come to rescue them—in his meat truck, no less. Was T-Bone the guardian angel Hegwitha had asked the Goddess to send? Maybe they could bring him back and show him around the camp, this freak whose every gesture defied the women’s low expectations of male behavior. T-Bone loving his daughters wouldn’t bring back the women burned as witches nor make up for the men who’d hurt and abused the women in the group. Still, Martha longed to take him to New York as a sort of traveling exhibit, to show the world (including Dennis) what was possible, even for a man, in terms of human kindness and grace. Not that Dennis would know what she meant. Dennis wouldn’t get it.

Martha’s father would have understood. He’d known what it was like to want to keep your loved ones safe, against impossible odds. He’d spent his working life convincing others and himself that safety could be purchased with convenient low monthly payments. Suddenly Martha felt her father’s presence in the cab of the truck, squeezing into the tiny gaps between her and T-Bone and Hegwitha. And for a moment the hum of the diesel engine sounded like his riding mower grazing in the sparkling grass on those sweet summer evenings…

T-Bone was saying, “Another tough thing is putting yourself on a kid’s wavelength. That’s because they inhabit a whole different time and space. Rennie is my wife Sally’s kid from her first marriage. She was four when I met her. What did I know about kids? The kid used to ask me what should she draw. I’d say, ‘Draw a clown or a horse or a cowboy,’ and she’d look at me, totally bored and trying not to show it.

“Then her mom would say, ‘Draw a cowboy getting shot by a clown and falling off his horse.’ And she’d go off happy and draw a really great picture. Sally told me, ‘You have to understand. Things are in motion for her.’ That’s when I asked Sally to marry me. I was so impressed.”

Imagine, that a man would be attracted to a woman because of some insight about a little girl! It was so unlike the reasons one assumed men married. Martha’s jealousy of T-Bone’s wife returned, doubly intense, no longer mediated by the thought of her stuck home alone with the kids.

All these miles away from his wife, T-Bone spoke of her as if saying her name could somehow bring her near. Did Dennis have a story about Martha? About how he knew he loved her while defrosting her fridge? Did he still describe her as someone who understood what he meant? Probably he said it just to torture Lucinda. But even that was better than his forgetting her completely. Didn’t everyone want someone thinking of them all the time, mentioning them at every chance, trying to bring them closer? Wasn’t that what the religious sought in a god or goddess: someone to keep them always in mind without the messy human complications.

Suddenly Hegwitha cried, “Wait! Hey, look, there’s Sonoma!”

“Is that her?” said T-Bone. “She looks like a fucking ghost.”

As T-Bone slowed to a stop, Sonoma scowled at the truck. She was wearing her white cowboy hat and white fringed satin shirt. The angle at which she stuck out her thumb was wonderfully aggressive. Her blond curls shone like the glossy fur of some pampered pet. Like the Virgin in a votive painting, Sonoma appeared to hover inside an oval of luminous mist.

Years later, in what seemed like another life, Martha sometimes remembered how they’d found Sonoma. Mostly Martha recalled it when one of her children wandered off and gave her a moment of terror in some supermarket or park, and Martha would run around searching, panicking, trying not to seem panicked, and at last she would find her daughter or son, in the clothes she’d put on that morning, their sweet familiar bodies and faces that had never looked so lovely, and she knew she could never explain how exhilarating it was: the thrilling speed with which her worst fears popped like bubbles and vanished. Sometimes she would think of that silvery dawn when they’d found Sonoma: a whispered promise of that other joy, waiting in her future.

Hegwitha and Martha had jumped from the truck. Sonoma’s jaw went slack—and then, despite herself, she’d grinned.

“Hey, dudes. How did you find me?” Her voice warbled, her face was white with raccoony rings of mascara encircling her brimming eyes. As they watched, a tremor rose up through her body until her lips and her fleshy cheeks began to wobble like aspic.

Martha and Hegwitha ran over and put their arms around her. Martha pressed her cheek against Sonoma’s head and inhaled the dusty scent of her hair. T-Bone had climbed down from the truck and was watching from a distance. Sonoma leaned against Martha and burrowed her damp face into her neck.

Sonoma was talking and crying at once, gulping back spit and tears. Gesturing incoherently, pointing at the cactus just behind them, she seemed to be saying something about the giant saguaro with two huge arms that curled in a tilted loop, roughly parallel to the ground.

At last Sonoma quit sobbing. She said, “I got tired. I stopped to rest by this awesome cactus. I stood there, just like this, between its arms—and I heard the arms talking. They were chattering to each other in their crazy space-creature voices. But the weirdest thing was that somehow I knew, I knew they were talking to
me
. They were giving me a message, telling me to stay put and do nothing and stand here and wait for you guys to come get me. They were saying you would find me…Hey, listen. Come on. It’s still happening. Hear that? Hear the cactus talking?”

No one asked Sonoma how she’d got there or where she had been or why she had run away from the camp or where she thought she was going. Motionless, barely breathing, the two women and the girl stood on the desert floor near the cactus, not far from the edge of the road. Like human arms, the cactus branches entwined them in its embrace.