Road to Paradise (31 page)

“We have to get something to eat,” said Candy. “There’s nowhere to stop between here and Wall Drug.”

“How the hell do
you
know this?” I flung open my map of South Dakota.

“You’ll see,” said Candy. “It’s just a sea out there. A sea of wheat waves. Beat it, cowboy,” she said to the Indian, smiling a little, her pink tank top riding up, her thin straps falling. He loitered near, not taking his unfocused eyes off her. The pink of her hair complemented nicely the pink of her top, and between them her brown eyes sparkled, far, far older than seventeen; my own soul was heavy with those eyes, with her life.

We found a run-down Mexican place; we ordered burritos and
ate them quietly, opening our mouths just long enough to argue whether a burrito was a sandwich or whether it wasn’t. Candy maintained it was a sandwich. Gina disagreed. “Well, if it’s not a sandwich, then what is it?”

“A burrito!”

“And what’s a burrito?”

“Meat wrapped in a tortilla.”

“Kind of like meat wrapped inside bread?”

“Kind of.”

“So it’s a sandwich.”

“No. A sandwich is a sandwich. And this is a burrito.”

“Which fits the description of a sandwich.”

“So does an Oreo cookie.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s sweet.”

“So? The beans inside the burrito have sugar in them. They’re sweet. Maybe my burrito is an Oreo cookie.”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“
I’m
being silly? I’m not the one calling a burrito a sandwich!”

On and on. I wondered if I should send Emma a postcard. For some reason I wanted to. Emma had never been to Nebraska. Had never been anywhere, except that one trip to Maine we took. She had been saving her money to go visit my father in prison, but then he died and we didn’t go.

Candy studied me, burrito in hand. “Have you sent her a postcard from anywhere else?”

“We weren’t near a geological miracle.”

“The Missouri? The Mississippi? Lake Michigan? Those aren’t miraculous?”

“I’m going to dazzle her with water? Larchmont is on Long Island Sound.” Emma told me she had always liked water. She said she didn’t want to live inland. I didn’t even know if she was born in Larchmont. I couldn’t believe I never asked her that. Ah, one more thing to feel queasy over.

“She’s going to think something is terribly wrong,” said Candy.

There was a pause between the three of us. Was there something terribly wrong? “Candy’s right, Sloane,” said Gina. “Better send nothing.”

We sat on a little patio on Main Street in the western, nearly-abandoned town. Gina and I bent our heads over the atlas, going from page 57 and Nebraska, to page 140 and South Dakota, because the atlas was foolishly and illogically arranged alphabetically, not geographically. We didn’t think Candy was right about U.S. 83. Clearly there were markings on the map that signified life. One town, another, and they were named; she should like that, she liked things named.

Candy was paying no attention to our musings. She was scanning the street, her gaze traveling across the houses, peering at the few people window-shopping. She watched this Valentine scene intently, without blinking. “Girls, what you think? Would a town like this be an okay town for me to hang my hat?”

We didn’t even bother looking at the street. “It’s like that old joke,” I said. “You and I are both looking at the people getting off the train. You think, how marvelous they are, look at their adorable little lives. And I think, ‘People get
off
here?’”

She frowned blankly. “Where’s the joke in that?”

I slapped the atlas closed. “Let’s go. Candy, what are you getting all wistful about Valentine for? Aren’t you headed to Paradise?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not permanently, duh.”

She amused even Gina. Gina!

“But it’s named
Paradise
,” Gina teased. “You’re the one going on and on about names giving value to things. How bad could it be?”

“This is where it shows that you don’t know everything,” said Candy. “Back when the gold rush ran like madness through California, particularly that area, some men used the town as an outpost for all kinds of unsavory activities. One of the saloons in the area was named
Pair O’Dice
. Get it?”

After a few times of mouthing it to ourselves, we got it. “Exactly.
So don’t wax all rhapsodic. Mike said the town is the most boring place he’d ever been to.”

“What, all the saloons closed?” said Gina, smiling.

“Each and every one.”

At our car, the Indian was parked out. “You girls feel like giving an old man a ride?” he slurred, leering at Candy. He was old, probably in his late twenties.

“Uh—no.”

“Come on, just up to Mendosa. I’ll get out then, I
promise
.”

“Where did we hear that before,” I muttered to Gina, and louder said, “No, no.
We
promised our mothers we wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers. Sorry.”

Our mothers.

He grinned lewdly. “You don’t look like the kind of girls who always listen to their mothers.”

It was three in the afternoon! Gina didn’t even look his way as she got in the car, modestly pulling down her short shorts. It was Candy who appraised him. “Got any scratch, cowboy?” she asked—and before I could yank her by the hand, he said, “I like your little yellow vehicle. I like it very much.”

Candy didn’t need any more prodding to slide in behind me on the driver’s side.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “You want to get us into
more
trouble? Besides, it’s three in the afternoon!”

“What, time not good?”

“Candy,” I said, “keep your eye on the prize. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Wall Drug by six.”

“You’re so right,” she said. “Paul and Silas said that. Keep your eye on the prize. But I wasn’t going to sin. Just have some fun. Having fun is an admirable quality.”

“So is prudence,” I said.
I!

I peeled away from the curb so the Indian couldn’t take down my license plate number. I didn’t get a chance to send Emma that postcard from the Valentine Sand Hills.

After driving for a while, Gina broke the silence. “Let me ask
you, Candy Cane, when you lived your nocturnal life on the Ohio River, did you ever make it to a place of worship?”

“Every Sunday,” Candy replied. “And do not think of yourself more admirably than you ought, Gina Reed. Appraise yourself, not me, with sober judgment, recalling the measure of faith God has given you.”

“How about if I just appraise
you
with sober judgment,” said Gina. “Because my faith is small. Step on it, Sloane.”

We had cheered up after we ate and the rain stopped. From my nightmare at the Argosy to now was barely the breadth of half a day, and yet we, our backs hurting, my sandpaper eyes burning, and watching always for the shape of a truck, were now managing to be less caustic with each other. It was better.

Too bad it didn’t last.

I had to agree with Candy, though, and her compelling argument. The burrito was a sandwich.

Something happens to you on the road. Something happened to me. You’re driving, humming, looking around, or you’re tense and fretting, chewing your nails on the hand that’s not clutching the wheel, you’re arguing and dreaming. Meantime, the fields, the trees, the farms are passing by. Jersey and Maryland, you’re barely paying attention. Pennsylvania is familiar, Ohio full of trucks. The Interstate, I realized now, is the death of all cross-country travel. You can go 2000 miles and all things on the Interstate look, smell and feel exactly the same, the rest stops, the steel rails, the cat’s eyes and the trucks. There is no life on the Interstate. Ohio showed me that.

Iowa, Iowa, Iowa. It rained there, and the rain washed away some of the familiar things I’d seen, the fields, the trees, the silos; the rain washed away the colors of my old life, and it rained through half of Nebraska. I was deceived by the plainness of it, the ostensible blankness of it. But somewhere in Nebraska, on that empty road, while listening to Candy talk about her torn-up life, going seventy an hour, I blinked and suddenly realized I had been transported to a different life.

She did this to me. Nebraska did this to me.

By the time we got to South Dakota, by the time we took U.S. 83 north, I was an unmoored ship at sea. There were no Iowan
farms, or Nebraskan fields, no people, no trees, just nothing, but waves and waves of grass against the endless sky. It was like nothing I’d ever seen, ever imagined, or even begun to imagine.

Simply, I left one life behind and entered another, one state of being, one way of understanding and entered another. Where precisely this happened I didn’t know, but I knew it was irrevocably so when my eyes saw the waves of the sea in the flowing, yellow-ochre grass of South Dakota. When I looked at Candy, she no longer looked the same to me. I couldn’t say what was different about her, the eyeliner was still black, the bra still missing, the legs still slender and smooth. She was composed and calm-eyed, her pink hair familiar, but she simply didn’t look the same after all the things she had told me.

When I tried to explain to the girls about South Dakota, which was the only thing I
could
talk about, I don’t think I did a very good job. Gina obviously thought I was crazy, while Candy looked at me like every place she’d ever seen was how I was seeing South Dakota now. “There is beauty everywhere,” she said. “
He sends
springs into the valleys and they flow among the hills
.”

“Beauty?” Gina said. “This burned grass is beauty? The sand in Nebraska was beauty?”

“Oh my God, yes! Beauty,” I said. At ninety an hour on a deserted road in the middle of an ocean, the windows open wide and wind roaring in the joytruck, we blew by a town comprised of two businesses: a garage and a church. Lakota Chapel, it read. “All Welcome.”

“This is how people describe their conversion to God,” Candy said. “They use the same language you’re using now, Sloane. They repeat Oh my God about a thousand times. They say, there I was just living my regular life, minding my own business, going about things in the same old way, muddling through, but always, imperceptibly, moving on the path to God, and suddenly exclaiming, ‘Of course! I see it now. Every old thing is not like before. All things are made new.’”

Is that what I was feeling? Is that what I was trying to say? My
whole chest was sick with it. “But you do see it, Candy?” I asked, my voice high, almost pleading. “You do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“I see it,” she said. “I see it everywhere. In the canals of Isle of Capri, the rush hour of Chicago.”

“On the Iowa-80 truck stop?” Gina inquired dryly.

“Especially there. Sun sets there, too.”

“Sloane, close your window. I can’t hear a thing.”

The air stopped gushing through, and now it was as if we were watching a movie again. We were behind glass, and the land was beyond the glass, separated from us, like moving pictures. It wasn’t as dramatic. It wasn’t like living it. But now I could hear Candy.

She told us that Floyd had come out to West Virginia for a family funeral. His folks had been cattle-ranching in South Dakota for generations, and they soon returned home, but Floyd came back to stay with rels. He and Candy had met at Our Lady of Martyrs church, where they both sang in the choir and had become tight.

“Tight? Or thick as thieves?” Gina commented. “Floyd. What a name. Does he look like a Floyd?”

“Sure does.”

“You’d think Floyd wouldn’t want God to know him by his name,” mused Gina.

“I guess. I wish God wouldn’t know me by Candy. Grace is so much better.” Candy sighed with conflicted resignation. “But.” She shrugged. “Candy made me more money.”

“It does reveal the essence of the thing, don’t it,” I said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. Candy. Like a strawberry lollipop. Without the makeup, plain and waving on the side of the road. Grace.

Like this we rode the sea of sage and brush and rolling grasslands, not seeing a soul until deep in South Dakota when we got onto I-90. Candy slunk down on the seat again, the hundreds of trucks
unsettling us, so we took the next exit and drove the parallel service road instead. It was almost six.

It looked like it was about to rain; by the time we got to Wall Drug, black covered nearly the whole sky. It was dinnertime, yet the place was empty. Wall Drug maybe began as a drugstore years ago, but when it decided to become a tourist attraction, it branched out into a restaurant and a trinket shop. Perhaps they had some Band-Aids and an aspirin hidden somewhere, but on display were stuffed jackalopes.

Candy came up to a man behind the counter. “I’m looking for Floyd,” she said. “He around?”

“Floyd?” said the man gruffly. “Floyd Lashly? He don’t work here no more.”

“But I just spoke to him and he told me to meet him here.”

“I don’t know what he told
you
, all I know is, I fired his ass three weeks ago and haven’t seen him since.”

Candy shook her head, not comprehending. “No, no. He’s worked here two years.”

“I know! I hired him, I fired him.”

“He told me to meet him here,” Candy said, nearly crying, but the burly plaid-shirted guy had already turned away.

She called the number she had for him, but no one answered. “I don’t understand,” she whispered to me and Gina after dialing twenty times. “I just spoke to him yesterday.”

“Maybe he’s not home?” Gina said helpfully.

“I came all the way from West Virginia to see Floyd,” Candy said to the woman serving coffee and toffee donuts, her voice breaking. “He just moved out from his folks a little while ago. Do you know where he lives now?” Standing behind her, I didn’t see her face, but I saw in her strained calf muscles intense anxiety. “Please,” she whispered. “Please. He’s my good friend.”

The coffee was cold and weak, the donut pretty good. The lady shook her head. “He left on bad terms. I don’t got that information.” She was not particularly friendly or sympathetic, but she was a woman, and she saw something in Candy’s glazed despair
that obviously made an impression on her. The manager yelled at the waitress to get back to work, “before he fired her ass, too.” She picked up a coffee pot, poured some into a cup for Candy, fussed with another donut, and as she took two dollars from her, said, “Go through the Badlands, at the junction of 44 and 240 there be a town called Interior, you’ll see a yellow trailer with a red roof. That’s Floyd’s.”

Candy smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” She gave the woman a ten-dollar tip and left, without taking either the coffee or the donut.

“Take the donut, Cand,” I said. “It’s delicious.”

“Suddenly, I lost my appetite. I’ll get hungry again when we find Floyd.”

“Candy,” said Gina, “what does he do? Keep the money you send him under his pillow?”

“I don’t know where he keeps it.”

I didn’t say anything. I was not the kind of girl who’d say, oh, you’re going flat across the entire country to find your mother, but what if she doesn’t want anything to do with you? And so, in this instance, neither was I the kind of girl who said, even teasing, so you called this Floyd yesterday to tell him you’d meet him today at six, and he said okay, sure thang, sweetheart, and when you got there, you found out he’d been fired three weeks ago Tuesday. This doesn’t crash alarm bells through your head? But it wasn’t my style, particularly if I suspected that the teasing struck too close to the truth, so I kept my mouth nice and shut as we crossed the divided highway and drove south into Badlands under the black sky. The summer tourists must have heard a storm was coming: there was no one on the road except Bambi, his mother, and us.

“Badlands,” I said to Gina, as a matter of statement. “Didn’t Bruce Springsteen write a song about them?”

“Who?” Candy said from the back.

Gina and I both groaned theatrically.

And from the back, we heard her voice, lowered two octaves, suddenly sing,
I believe in the faith that could save me
…

When she saw our comically struck faces, she threw her head back and laughed her sing-song, contagious child-like laugh. “Badlands I know,” she said.

It was an endless winding way through the Badlands to Interior. The turns were hairpin and we could go no more than twenty miles an hour. The black clouds were building ominously ahead. A few times it felt like I could easily slip off the road. Once I got so scared we had to stop at a scenic view to collect my bearings, which I had lost around the last hairpin. Candy wanted to keep going. There was a twitchy nervousness about her. “Come on,” she kept saying. “Come on. Let’s go.” But I had to stop long enough for my hands to stop shaking. It was tough Gina who got us through it. It was Gina who looked out her open window and said, “Oh my God, will ya just look at this?”

We looked, but we were too preoccupied with our fears to fully appreciate what we were seeing. “Girls, do you even see what I see? You two are unbelievable. Three days you gawked at a field in Iowa, you were breathless about sand, and don’t even get me started on grass in South Dakota. ‘Loooook, grass! It’s God, oooh.’ And here’s something you’ve actually never seen before, and you couldn’t care less.”

Candy and I pretended to care. For five minutes we stood at the top of a crest overlooking what seemed to be the entire north of all the Dakotas, north and upward to the dangerous sky.

“The Sioux Indians,” said Candy dully. “They stood right here, motionless, watching buffalo at sunset. They would take out their suncatchers, little bits of stone and wood with holes in them, to reflect the sun into the buffalo’s eyes. The buffalo would become dazzled, one would buck, then another, there’d be a confusion, then a stampede. That’s when the Indians would run down the hill and slaughter the animals that had fallen in the frantic run. They would have food and skins for the winter.”

Gina and I stared at her like she was a buffalo.

She pointed to the National Park sign at the edge of the view. “
INDIAN SLAUGHTER GROUNDS
.”

“All right, let’s go,” said Gina, reaching for a word of comfort and failing to find it. All I could see was Erv sitting across from me, his ice eyes trying to penetrate my secrets, and now that I knew what kind of a man he was, it made it harder for me to look straight at Candy. Too much vivid imagining. If we hid, our hiding gave us away. If we remained in plain sight, our gawking gave us away. Everything gave us away while we were exposed on the plains like this.

“Why would Floyd lie to me?” Candy asked. “Maybe he forgot. Do you think so?” She sounded so scared.

“I think so, Candycane,” I said, squeezing her arm, not lifting my eyes. “He just didn’t want you to worry. He’ll be home. You’ll see. Come on.”

The Badlands are a steep rock gully, an intricate, meandering ravine of eroding sedimentary rock that goes on for a hundred miles. I wished we could look at it with eyes not dimmed by Candy’s worry and my lies. As I was making razor turns down steep inclines between mountains of prehistoric rock, it started to rain again. Pretty soon it was so heavy I could see nothing but the streaming hood of my yellow Mustang. I had to stop, but there was nowhere to pull off. We were stuck on a two-lane road going blind down a mountain pass, so we idled in the car, but that inching forward was even more frightening. At any moment, someone could come plowing into me from behind, send me flying into the ancient clay and mud. We were just sitting, waiting for something bad to happen. “Hence, the name,” said Candy. “Badlands.” She was no longer serene. “Come on, Shel. Please try to hurry. It’s just a few more miles, right? We’re almost there.”