Night at the Fiestas: Stories (11 page)

“Fancy-Francy, I ever tell you about the time a lady left a baby on the bus?”

Frances tamped down a surge of irritation, closed her book, and gave her father a tight, tolerant smile in the mirror. “You have.”

Of course he had. Twice a day for twenty years he’d driven the same dusty two hundred miles between Raton and Santa Fe, never even stepping off his bus to walk down the faded main streets of the towns he passed through. Every single day, the landscape changing in the same ways: deepening or rippling, shading greener here, flatter there, from high plain to chaparral to woodland plateau and back again, the vistas unbroken except for the occasional herd of antelope or deer or, more rarely, elk. Of course he’d told her about the baby.

“You’re kidding,” said the crocheting woman. “Blessed be.”

“Yep,” her father said with enthusiasm. “She gathered up all her packages and boxes, but left the baby.”

He told it again, how another passenger had discovered the baby fast asleep on the seat when they were only a few miles outside of Maxwell, how he’d slowed the bus, made an excruciating many-pointed turn on the empty blacktop highway, and drove back to the depot in town. They found the woman without much trouble; it was a small town, and the man behind the ticket counter pointed her out, sitting on a bench outside the station, surrounded by her luggage.

Frances could understand wanting to abandon a baby; the mystery was why the woman had only left it on a bus and not in the boondocks where no one would find it. Frances babysat, but just because there were things she needed: beautiful, transformative clothes, a typewriter, a powder-blue valise. Above all, Frances needed to get out of Raton for good. She wanted to go to college, to take her place among the fresh-faced young men and women at UNM, skirt swinging and books clutched to her chest, her face raised to the warm possibility of romance. This weekend was practice for the day when she would board this bus again and never return.

“My God,” said the woman. “She must have been out of her head with worry.”

“Claimed it was a mistake and practically tore that baby from my arms. But I’m not sure she convinced me, wasn’t crying or anything. Who’s to say she didn’t pull the same stunt on some other guy’s route?” Still, the story had a happy ending: “All that, and we arrived in Santa Fe only nine minutes behind schedule.”

It was an excellent story made stupid by his telling: for instance, when he’d told it the first time at dinner, it was the turn that had seemed to interest him most; he’d demonstrated on the tablecloth using his knife as the bus.

Frances looked at her father in the driver’s seat—his round, sloping shoulders, the stubble on the back of his neck. He held the big wheel with both hands as if it were a roasting pan. He used to be a frustrated man, a shouter and a spanker. But he’d mellowed as Frances got older. Now he sought her company with a sort of sodden sentimentality that left her at once touched and galled.

“Shame I can’t go with you,” her father called. “To the Fiestas. It would be nice to see Lillian, spend some time with you girls.”

Frances kept her eyes on her book, pretending not to have heard. The swell of power this gave her was like an electric charge.

“Would you look at that,” he tried again, sweeping his hand across the windshield. “You don’t get views like these from an office, Francy.”

“Daddy, I have to do some reading. For school.” She held her book up to the mirror and sighed dramatically. “I’ll just move back. You two enjoy your conversation.”

“Smart as a whip, my girl,” her father told the crocheting woman, but Frances could hear the hurt in his voice.

She stood, lifted down her bag, and as she did, her dress ripped at the armpit. From her new seat she examined the tear. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, digging in her swimming bag for her cardigan. Up front, her father had fallen silent, his shoulders hunched. He needed to get used to her absence, Frances reasoned, because soon she’d leave for college, and then what would he do? She’d be kind to him when she got off in Santa Fe. She’d tell him she loved him. Frances put on her cardigan, and then, hot, sat back and opened her book.

I
N
W
AGON
M
OUND
, three people boarded. A thin red-cheeked woman in a gray dotted sundress sat across the aisle from Frances, and a man swinging a lunch sack took the seat in front of her. He smiled from under a bristly caterpillar of a mustache. Frances, aware of his eyes on her, looked out the window at the road blurring below. She pictured herself: her slow blush, lashes lowered against her cheek.

“Whew. Hot, isn’t it?” The thin woman lifted off her straw hat, and her hair came with it, loosening from her chignon, then falling around her face in lank, damp strands. She pulled a pencil and a crossword from her purse and set to work.

All the while, Frances examined the man in her peripheral vision. He was sitting sideways, leaning against the window. He craned to see Frances over the backrest. Brown checked suit, agate bolo tie cinched tight under his collar. He was thirty, maybe. His hair was a little long, parted down the middle.

“Hey.” He stretched a narrow hand toward her, flicked her book. “Pretty girls should smile.”

People were always telling Frances to smile; apparently her face in its natural state was pinched and sulky. “Well, you aren’t beautiful,” her mother had said thoughtfully this summer. “But you’re perfectly fine when you smile.” Frances hated the implication that she ought to appear good-natured for someone else’s benefit. Who did this man—some ranch hand in his absurd city best—think he was? Still, he had called her pretty, and that was something. She raised an eyebrow in a way she hoped looked disdainful and queenly. “If I felt like smiling,” she said, “I would.”

He laughed, not unkindly. The man’s breath was damp and garlicky from, Frances imagined, some massive ranch breakfast eaten in a hot kitchen. Greasy yellow eggs, beans, fat sausages splitting their burned skins. The thought was nauseating, and Frances turned her head.

“You don’t make yourself sick, reading like that?”

Frances shook her head. She had absolutely no desire to talk to this man. She would not talk to this man. But her silence hung between them, unmistakable and rude. “No,” she said finally. “I never get carsick.”

“Lucky. I was in the Navy, and I never did get used to the seasickness.”

“Well,” said Frances, “it can’t help, sitting backward like that.”
Rude
, her mother would call her; Frances preferred
spirited
.

“What are you reading?”

What could Thomas Hardy possibly mean to him? Frances displayed the cover, feeling superior.

“So you’re a smarty-pants,” said the man. “Huh.”

Frances had begun
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
that summer with trepidation, and she was proud of herself for making it as far as she had. Even more than the story, Frances enjoyed the image of herself reading this fat book with its forbidding, foreign-sounding title. It was a prop, exactly the book a girl with a powder-blue valise would be reading. And apparently, as a prop it was working.

The fellow lit a cigarette, exhaled, still watching her. “I’m not much for reading. Myself, I’m a painter.”

Frances brightened and set the book in her lap. “Really? What do you paint? Figures?” She blushed.

“Nudes, you mean? That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”

Frances’s blush deepened. She didn’t deny it.

He laughed. “I’d say I’m more of an action painter.” He scratched his mustache with a finger, eyes on her, then took another drag.

Did that mean what she thought it meant? Was Frances being propositioned? He
was
thinking of her that way, wasn’t he? Certainly he wasn’t talking to the woman across the aisle. And why was that? Because the woman across the aisle was plain and had an entirely untended mustache. Frances ran her finger over her own upper lip, plucked last night in preparation for Santa Fe.

And now Frances wasn’t just a girl going into the world, but a girl whose virtue was being tested. That it might not withstand the test was a thrilling prospect. Frances suddenly felt deeply certain that something momentous
would
happen this weekend. Not with this fellow, though he really wasn’t bad-looking, despite his breath, and it was possible that the breath was just a result of his devil-may-care artistic lifestyle. Too many reefers, maybe.

Men in Raton utterly overlooked Frances. Only two boys had ever asked her on dates, both pitiful specimens still awaiting their growth spurts. And now what Frances had always suspected was true: She
did
have sex appeal.
Under her bodice the life throbbed quick and warm.

Frances couldn’t wait to tell Nancy. Nancy was involved in endless drama with bevies of boys, while Frances, with her modest clothes and overprotective mother, had to play the supporting role to her younger cousin, probing for details, shaking her head in scandalized admiration, offering advice on matters she had absolutely no personal experience with. At least Frances lived in Raton; Nancy didn’t know how little she knew.

“Are you going to the Fiestas?” She smiled in a way she hoped was coy. “You must be, dressed like that.”
Handsome
, she probably should have said, but it really was a terrible suit.

“You’ll be there?” His green eyes—lovely eyes, now that she was looking—were bright and amused. Was he laughing at her? “Are you asking me out? Maybe you’d like to get a drink with me.”

Frances straightened her sweater; she wanted to remove it, show off her arms, but was aware of the hole in her dress. “
You’d
like that, wouldn’t you?” Who knew she had it in her, this sauciness!

“You should be careful.” The painter twisted to stub his cigarette out in the ashtray, and Frances noted that his nails were clean. She would have thought he’d have paint around his cuticles. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

“
You
don’t know a thing about
me
,” Frances retorted.

The painter shook his head, bemused, and faced front. Frances kept waiting for him to turn back—he’d spoken to her first, after all—and once she nearly said something, but he bundled his jacket for a pillow and fell asleep against the window.

For the rest of the ride Frances went over the interaction, and she didn’t forget her pique until they entered Santa Fe. As they approached downtown, the traffic thickened and tangled; at every street, it seemed, they stopped for crowds of happy pedestrians to cross. The passengers watched from the windows, and laughter and shouts rose above the rumble of the vehicles. Frances’s spirits soared.

When they pulled up in front of the bus depot on Water Street, the painter stood before they’d even stopped and reached for his canvas bag. Then he leaned over her and squinted out Frances’s window, as if scanning the crowded sidewalk for the person who’d come to pick him up. Frances braced herself for the smell of his breath, and then it came. “Little whore,” he said in her ear, so softly she wondered if she’d imagined it, and before she’d even lifted her gaze to him, he was moving quickly down the aisle, stepping off the bus.

Frances flushed and for what felt like a long time couldn’t move. Had anyone heard? But they were all disembarking now, straightening hats and shirt collars. Up at the front of the bus, her father was shaking hands and tipping his hat, helping the woman with the crochet down the steps.

Frances took a deep breath to compose herself. That painter was nothing, no one. He probably wasn’t even a painter. She could see him on the sidewalk. He’d bought a paper from the newsstand by the depot and was paging through it. Go away, go away, go away, thought Frances. She would not budge from this bus until he’d disappeared down the street.

Heart pounding, she arranged her purse and her swimming bag on her shoulders, straightened her cardigan.

“Enjoy the Fiestas,” said the thin woman, setting her hat back on her head.

It was then that Frances noticed he’d left his lunch sack on his seat. Suddenly she was filled with rage at this man who’d had the gall to speak to her in the first place, to tell her to smile and then to insult her when she did. She would step off the bus, call to him, smiling and sunny—“Sir, your lunch!”—wave the paper sack over her head, make as if to hand it to him. And then, when he reached for it—shamed by her kindness—Frances would open her hand, drop it in the street, and grind his sandwich under her heel.

She leaned over the seat, snatched the sack. She was so angry she was trembling.

When Frances looked inside, there was no sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, no apple or jelly jar of milk, no food at all. Inside the bag was a fat stack of bills.

She walked stiffly down the aisle and submitted to her father’s kiss goodbye. She flushed, hot and ashamed, as if her father somehow knew what she’d done, knew what the painter had called her.

“Be safe, Francy. Be good.” He pulled her in for an extra hug, and Frances, with the paper sack stuffed in her purse, responded, “Of course.”

Then Frances was down the bus steps and into the arms of Nancy and Aunt Lillian, who shrieked and clung and jabbered at her. They each took an arm and waved gaily with their free hands as her father’s bus pulled into the Water Street traffic, then dragged her along the crowded sidewalk between them. “The Plaza’s already full!” cried Nancy. “I thought you’d never get here.”

“She’s been beside herself all day,” said Aunt Lillian. Behind her, the painter was still reading the paper. Every once in a while he scanned the street.

“Wait,” said Frances, stopping. “I’d like to drop my things at your house.”

“We can’t go home!” said Nancy. “Everything’s already started. Plus, I’m starving. The Elks Club is selling hot dogs and Frito pies!”

Frances felt she was walking strangely. Her purse was barely heavier, but it had tipped her off-balance and her gait was self-conscious and labored. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

The bus depot restroom was vile, the floor wet around the toilet and dirty with footprints. Ordinarily, Frances would have hovered over a toilet like this, and even then only in an emergency. Today, though, she sat right down.