Sisters of the Road (23 page)

“What about a guy named Wayne? Wayne Hemmings? Is he gay too?”

“Who knows?” He shrugged. “I think he was one of Karl’s protégés at first, but it’s hard to tell. You see them around together a lot, but I’m not sure if Wayne feels sorry for Karl or if he really gets a kick out of the guy.

“It’s not that Wayne is an especially good artist,” the man went on. “I don’t know how he survives—probably dealing drugs—but he seems too smart to be hanging around with someone like Karl.”

He picked up his long pipe again and put it to his lips. I took that as a sign that he’d told me all he knew. I thanked him and left.

I tried Wayne’s apartment at the Redmond twice that day, but he either wasn’t around or wasn’t answering his door. It made me wonder how the cops could be so sure he was still in Seattle.

That night June, Carole and I had dinner at my place. It was partly to make up for my absence and partly in honor of a letter from Penny, brought back from Nicaragua by a friend. June had received it while I was in Portland and suggested we all read it together.

Carole arrived first. I expected a little mutual embarrassment, but she was breezy and bouncy as ever, more so because she’d managed to find a new lover in the last couple of days.

“She’s incredibly interesting, Pam,” Carole assured me, perched on a stool in the kitchen and shredding lettuce with dreamy abandon. “She’s been all over the world, like to Nepal and stuff. She tells these wonderful stories about trekking and sherpas and everything. I’m so
envious
.”

“Wait a minute. Not Devlin?”

“Oh, that’s right, she said she knew you slightly.”

Slightly.

“
Another
girlfriend?” June said when she heard, then remembered her manners. “Well, congratulations. I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

“Oh, I think so,” said Carole eagerly. “Sometimes you just know, like practically in the first instant, if someone’s going to be right for you. Maybe that’s romantic, but I don’t care. We’ve already got a lot of plans—we’re going to go traveling together. Bali, I guess.” She made some Balinese hand movements to illustrate. “It’s a very artistic culture there. I know I’ll like it.”

“Forget it,” June warned her. “Nobody’s going nowhere until Penny and Ray get back. Which brings me to the high point of the evening,” she said, brandishing the letter. “A communiqué from our revolutionary sister down on the coffee bean farm. Here,” she tossed it to me, “you do the honors.”

I opened it and read aloud:

“Dear Pam, June and Carole,

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard in my life. We get up at four a.m., before it’s light, eat some rice and beans and start walking into the mountains to pick. Sometimes planes fly overhead—American military mostly. We’re not far from the Honduran border and you really feel the contra presence. Earlier this week a man from the village where we’re staying was ambushed and killed; two weeks ago almost a whole village, mainly women and kids, was wiped out. A lot of people carry guns here—they have to. They stand on duty while we pick. We pick all day until about four o’clock, thousands of bright red beans. I know I’m never going to drink a cup of coffee in the same way again.

“In the evenings we study Spanish and sometimes listen to talks on life before and after the revolution. I’m embarrassed by some of the Americans with us. They’re not used to such hard work (neither am I, obviously), and complain all the time. One guy is in training to be a photo-journalist, I think. He goes around with three cameras around his neck, trying to pose everyone.

“The people are incredibly kind and patient with us. They keep saying, ‘Can’t you tell your government that we don’t want to fight with them, we just want to live our lives in peace? It was enough that we had to make the revolution. Now let us just live it.’ Something like seventy percent of their entire economy is going for defense right now. So many of the hopeful social programs of the last five years have had to be abandoned—all because of this stupid military threat from the U.S. The Nicaraguans consider us at war with them right now, though there are no American soldiers. Because of the economic boycott and because they’re constantly living with the fear of invasion. But it is a war—about 6,000 people were killed last year alone.

“Ray and I are fine, though I’ve been sick a lot. At first I thought it was due to the high altitude or change in diet, but now it turns out I’m pregnant! [‘Pregnant!” I stumbled, then continued. ] I guess I’m going to keep it. I’d have to leave if I were going to have an abortion. And I don’t want one anyway. I hope you’ll all be happy for me. Pam, you’ll be an aunt! Must go now. Lots of love, Penny.”

“Our Penny, a mother!” June marveled. “Well, well, someone to carry on the family business. What’s the matter, Pam, you don’t look too cheerful.”

“It’s not that.” I didn’t know what I felt, actually. Glad for Penny, shocked, curious. I’d known it was bound to happen sometime. I just wasn’t prepared. I looked at the two women sitting across from me at the table—happily coupled in their different ways—and thought, Well, at least Hadley’s coming back.

Carole left early to meet Devlin (They were going to a travelogue on Indonesia), but June stayed to help wash the dishes, and I told her about Portland.

The main thing is,” I said, “is that I feel like I failed to get Trish to trust me. But I tried to be as nonjudgemental as possible. I’ve thought and thought about prostitution and I don’t feel put off, the way I once did. I don’t think badly of her—for anything she’s done or that’s been done to her.”

“Maybe it’s more a question of her thinking badly of herself. You know how, when you’ve sunk down low in your own estimation, ain’t nobody can pull you back up. You’re suspicious when somebody is nice to you, you think they must be putting you on if they say you’re all right. Because inside you know you’re a piece of shit.”

“I’ve never felt that, anyway not so much that I couldn’t fight back against those feelings.”

“You’re lucky then, if you don’t get affected by a look on the street or somebody’s mean words—and feel inside somehow that you deserve it.”

“You? June, I can’t believe it. You’re the strongest person I know.”

“I’m also a Black person.” She paused and scrubbed hard at a pot, bending her sculpted dark head and neck over the sink. “But think about it—aren’t there times, when you’re reading a history book or looking at the newspapers and there’s some mention of how women can’t, women never—and in spite of knowing that that’s all wrong, you think to yourself, Women can’t, women never?”

“When you put it like that—who hasn’t?”

“I don’t go along with those who say things like all women are prostitutes,” June continued, “cause we get married to support ourselves or have to trade sex for favors. But I believe you have to think about it sometimes from that angle. Ain’t
no
woman alive who’s living her life the way she wants to, the way she
could
be living it. If you think about it that way, you won’t have to use words like ‘nonjudgemental.’ Because, when it comes down to it, you be in the same boat, honey. And we’ve all got to sink or swim together—never mind the mixed metaphor.” June drained the water out. “So you don’t have any idea where whoever it is could be hiding her?”

“The only thing I haven’t tried today is calling her mother.”

“Why don’t you? I’ll hang around.”

Melanie was home alone and answered on the first ring. She was disappointed to hear it was me. “I’ve been waiting for Rob to call for hours. He didn’t come home to dinner. I don’t know where he can be.”

“Is that like him?”

“No,” she said immediately, then her worry got the better of her. “Well, he has been acting strange lately. I don’t know what’s come over him the past week. He says he’s looking for work and then he doesn’t come home. He doesn’t want to talk to me about it, that’s the worst part. I don’t blame him really. It’s not easy to find a job these days.”

“Melanie…” I paused. What I was going to ask her was hard. “There was never anything between Rob and Trish, was there? From Rob’s side. He didn’t…”

“No!” She was outraged. “How could you think anything like that? I would have
known.
I mean, I told him about Art—he knew how much that would have upset me.”

“Is that one reason you let Trish go out of your life so easily and stopped seeing her? Because you were afraid it would happen again? Because Rob convinced you she was a whore and nothing but a whore, and he couldn’t be responsible for what happened?”

“I didn’t let her go easily. It
wasn’t
easy. I don’t know how you can say such things. You’re not a mother, or you’d know. It’s never easy.”

“Then help me,” I said. “Help me find her. Is there any place at all you think she could be? That somebody could have taken her?”

Her anger was spent and she was crying. But finally she said, “I don’t know. But if she’s with Wayne… we have a cabin up above Index, in the Cascades. Wayne used to go up there until Rob made him give back the key…”

“Where exactly is it?”

She was reluctant to give me directions. “I don’t know if Rob would like it. You going there.”

“It may be a question of saving your daughter’s life. At this point I don’t know what somebody might do to her.”

“But Rob…”

“Stop thinking of Rob for a minute and think of Trish. Please, Melanie.”

She gave in and told me where the cabin was, probably not so much because she really believed that Trish was there, or that Trish was in danger, but because she was used to yielding. Or perhaps that was wrong. Maybe she really did think Rob had done something to her daughter and was just too afraid to say it.

I
NDEX WAS IN THE MOUNTAINS
, a tiny town on the Skykomish River. It took us over an hour to get there, in spite of June’s speed. There was snow and ice on the road; the night seemed very black. Index had a population of 169, according to its sign, a few stores and city buildings, a gas station and a tavern. Only the tavern was open.

“Go up the winding road on your left out of town,” Melanie had said. “It’s about two miles, but you may not be able to get through if there’s a lot of snow.”

She was right. Halfway out of town the road became undriveable. June wanted to turn back. “If we can’t get through, neither could anybody else, especially not dragging Trish along.”

“They could have walked. She might have gone willingly and he didn’t have to drag her. They might have had snowshoes.”

“They could have, but we don’t. I say we go back to Index and call the Washington State Patrol.”

“Not yet,” I said. “We’ll look stupid if she’s not there.”

“We’ll look stupid if she is there and if the guy has a gun or something. In fact, we may look dead.”

“Well, you can go back, but I’m going on. At least to see if there’s a light in the window or anything.” I got out of the car.

“You are too damned stubborn for your own good,” she called after me. “Besides, you know I’d never let you go up there alone.”

“Thanks, June.”

“Sink or swim… I think I’m sinking,” she added as she got out of the car and fell into a drift.

I helped her out and we started up the road.

The night was full of stars and frost; the black firs on either side wore coats of white and peaked white caps. As we stumbled up the slope I thought I saw footprints on the road, but we didn’t have a flashlight and it was too dark to be certain.

“I don’t know whether I want anybody to be there or not,” June said. “What I’d really like is for a nice grandmotherly creature to fling open the door just as we get there and say, Pam and June! Just in time for a nice hot buttered rum!’”

“How’s your training in outdoor survival?” I asked. “Do you know how to dig a snow cave for protection and conserve your body heat?”

“My people came from
Africa
, girl. We don’t have those anti-cold genes like you reindeer hunters.”

“Once, when Penny and I were twelve, our parents took us to Norway in the spring to visit relatives. That’s the big skiing season, but that’s also when they have all the avalanches. And every night on television they’d have these public service clips—showing families making snow caves and telling you how to survive until help came.”

“I’m glad that at least one of us is prepared.”

“Well, I never actually found myself in an avalanche… I think you’re supposed to be carrying a lot of basic necessities. Food and extra clothes and stuff.”

We chattered to keep from freezing and kept walking.

“Look,” June said. “There’s a cabin. You think that’s it?”

A small one-room cabin with a shed full of wood attached huddled under a tall stand of firs. Through the window the flicker of a kerosene lamp was visible.

We crept silently up and looked inside, afraid to even whisper to each other.

The room was clean and cozy, with a couch, a big pine table and chairs, a bookshelf and a small wood stove. There was a braided rug on the floor and a couple of pictures on the wall. No one was there.

June and I looked at each other and then she opened the door and we went in.

It was freezing cold and our heavy boots made the floor creak.

“Hello,” I said, in too loud a voice. “Anybody here?”

“Somebody must have been here,” said June, sounding relieved. “They must have just forgot the lamp.”

“Wait,” I said. I had noticed a loft with a ladder leading up to it. “Anybody up there?”

Silence. Neither June nor I could get up enough nerve to climb the ladder. But all of a sudden I became aware that someone was in the room was us, even though I couldn’t hear breathing.

“Trish,” I called cautiously. “Trish, are you up there?”

Nothing.

June picked up the ski pole that was standing by the door and pointed the sharp end of it towards the loft. Even in her heavy down jacket and beret there was something warrior-like about her. “I’m coming up,” she said threateningly. She advanced up the ladder with the ski pole before her. Halfway up I heard her gasp.

“Oh, my god. Child, what has he done to you?”

She went all the way up and I followed at her heels.