The Leisure Seeker: A Novel (16 page)

I don’t speak because I can’t stop looking at the sky, at its long yawning unending face. It is the biggest, brightest, bluest sky I’ve ever seen. It hurts to look at it, but I can’t stop. I scan its cloudless expanse, my eyes flicking here and there and here, shifting every which way, like those pictures I’ve seen on TV of the way our eyes move as we dream. My heart fluttering and catching, I search this aching span, waiting for it to tear
itself open and reveal what I know is there: a roaring vacuum that sucks everything into it that’s not nailed down.

I think maybe someone had a little too much coffee this morning.

When I realize this, my eyes finally pause and rest in one place. That’s when I can’t help but be stunned, plain old whopperjawed, by the beauty of this sky. As for its size, well, the sheer immensity of it makes me feel so insignificant that I realize that all my problems will ultimately pass with nary a soul noticing. It’s then that I find calm.

I look over at John and see the coffee has got him juiced up and crazy as well. He has his flag hat pulled down low over his eyes, making his ears stick out like Dumbo. He’s loaded for bear, determined to get some miles under our belt. These long-ago ways of ours die hard. It’s good that we’re on the freeway. Anyway, it won’t be long before I-40 meets up with a good-sized stretch of 66 past Clines Corners.

I touch my finger to my upper lip and it feels damp. The discomfort is back, but it’s a new brutal-edged kind, a searing hot blade tempered on the entrails. The kind of discomfort that makes me want to talk to my children. I drop the guidebook that I’m holding, open the glove box, and start fumbling around for the cellular phone.

“John? Did you do something with the phone?”

Blandly, John looks at me. “I didn’t touch it.”

This happens all the time at home. John hides things. He can no longer be trusted to put things away where they belong.
“Yes, you did. I left it in here in the glove box after I called the Auto Club. Where did you put it?”

He scowls at me. “I didn’t touch your goddamn phone.”

He’s getting mad, but I don’t care. I’m so goddamned tired of his bullshit. I pull everything from the glove box. No phone. I’m just about to start crying.

“Goddamn it, John!” I scream. “I know you did something with it. What did you
do
with it?”

“Shove it up your ass!” bellows John.

“You shove it up your ass, you senile old bastard.
Where did you put it?
”

Then I remember that on the shelf near the dash, by the cup holders, there’s a rectangular slot, a catchall compartment. I can’t see inside it, but I can reach down in there. I feel something that could be an antenna.

Bingo
. It’s the cell phone.

“Why the hell did you hide it in there, John?”

“I told you, I didn’t put it there.”

That’s when I remember that
I
put it in there after the last time I used it. In fact, I put it in there specifically so John wouldn’t hide it somewhere.

“Idiot,” I mutter.

“Drop dead,” says John.

“Oh, stop being such a pistol. I’m talking about myself.”

I roll up the window and turn the phone on. It makes a series of musical tones that are there to distract you from the fact that you’re about to shoot microwaves into your brain. I
think about taking a little blue pill, but I push the idea from my mind and instead punch in Cindy’s cell phone number, not sure if she’s got it turned on at work. But she answers immediately.

“Hi honey,” I say, so happy to hear my daughter’s voice that I can almost feel the pain recede.

“Mom?”

“Of course it’s your mother. Who did you think?”

“Mom. Where are you?” I ignore the exasperation in her voice. I hope I’m not getting her in trouble.

“Can you talk?”

“I’m on my break, Mom. Where
are
you?”

“We’re somewhere in New Mexico. It’s beautiful here. Honey, you should see the sky—”

Cindy cuts me off. “We’ve all been worried sick about you two. Thank God you’re all right. You have to come home, Mom.”

The last thing on earth I want to do is get in an argument with my daughter today. I’m just so happy to hear her voice. “Cynthia, there’s nothing to worry about. We’re both feeling great. Really, it’s been so much fun.”

She exhales loudly, as if she doesn’t believe me. I suppose I am laying it on a bit thick, but I’m trying to reassure her and maybe myself, too.

“You’ve got to come home.” Her voice is coarse, thick with emotion and cigarettes. I do wish she’d quit.

“Cindy, sweetie.”

“It’s just that you’re so sick. I’m just afraid—”

I don’t let her finish. I don’t need to hear her say this any more than she needs to say it. “Dear, what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s all right. We all have to be all right with it, okay?”

“Damn it, Mom.” She’s cursing, but her voice is whispery now, deflated. “Kevin keeps wanting to call the police.”

“Well, you tell Kevin that that’s a bad idea. He’s just going to make things worse. He’s going to turn us into Bonnie and Clyde.”

It occurs to me that we’ve already pulled a gun on some people and threatened to kill them. It’s too late. We
are
Bonnie and Clyde.

She clears her throat. “How’s Dad?”

“Your father is fine. He’s full of beans. He still has his little spells, but he’s doing all right. His driving has been very good. You want to talk to him?”

Snuffle. “Okay.”

I’m a little worried about him driving and talking on a phone at the same time, but I need a break to compose myself. I hand the phone over to John. “Roll up your window for a minute so you can talk on the phone.”

“Who is this?” John says, as he cranks the window up.

“It’s your daughter, dummy,” I say. “It’s Cynthia.” I say her name so he remembers to say it to her.

“Hi, Chuckles,” John says. Where did he pull out that from? He hasn’t called her Chuckles since the third grade. It was her favorite candy.

John is smiling like all get-out, so pleased to talk to his
daughter. I don’t know if he thinks he’s talking to a little girl or what, but what does it matter if he’s happy and Cindy feels better?

“We’ll be careful, kiddo,” John says. “Love you. We’ll see you soon.” He hands me the phone.

“Cindy?” I say.

“Yeah, Mom?” Her voice is brighter now. She sounds better, which makes me feel better.

“I love you, too.” The pain is coming back, but I don’t really care at the moment.

“Me, too.” Cindy lets out a ragged little wheeze. “Please be careful. Come home soon.”

I nod, then catch myself. “Give our love to Lydia and Joey. Tell your brother we called.”

“I will.” She breathes loudly into the phone and I can hear her voice break. “Bye, Mommy.”

I push the off button. My eyes are burning and I’m not sure if it’s the exhaust fumes filtering into the van, or the fact that my fifty-seven-year-old daughter, the one who has always been the tough, defiant child, the one who has sassed me since she was eight, just called me Mommy.

We are traveling through the foothills of the Rockies, surrounded by mountains. Suddenly, I need to talk now, I need to know that I am still here, still able to make a noise. I point at the mountains far to the north of us.

“See those mountains, John?”

“What?”

“Those mountains over in the distance.” John says nothing. He just yawns. Apparently I’m still here. I’m just boring.

“Those are the
Sangre de Cristo
Mountains,” I say.

John looks at me. “Crisco?” he says. “Like the shortening?”

“Cristo
. It means Blood of Christ,” I say.

“Hmph,” says John, sneering. “Christ, my ass.”

So ends our talk. In case you haven’t guessed, John is not a religious man. I suppose you could call him an atheist. His parents never instilled in him any sense of religion or God, and that’s probably where it started, but it was going off to war in his teens that made him a full-fledged heathen. He used to say that watching the head of the person standing next to you disappear doesn’t make you much feel like there’s a god.

When he came home from the war, John
was
different. He was no longer the boy from the neighborhood who pestered me like a gnat, asking me out all the time. I must have turned him down a dozen times. He was always saying that he was going to marry me. I’d laugh in his face, not in a mean way, but it was still laughing. He was younger than the boys I was dating, and I wasn’t attracted.

Eventually, I became engaged to another boy, but something happened to him during the war. You’re probably thinking I’m going to say he was killed, but you’d be wrong. The SOB dumped me. Yes, threw me over
during
the war. I was the only person I know that this happened to. I knew girls getting married, engaged, pregnant, you name it. I knew girls
whose boyfriends, fiancés, husbands were killed or missing in action, but I was the only one I knew who got the old heave-ho by their GI Joe. Charlie met someone else while stationed in Texas, some round-heeled Armenian broad. He wound up marrying her, after knocking her up.

But John made it back. I guess the most attractive thing about him then, aside from the fact that he had gotten bigger and quieter, was that he seemed no longer interested in me. He had written often during the first year he was away, telling me how much he looked forward to seeing me again, how much he missed home. (Decades later, he showed me photographs he had taken during the war, and I remember being struck by how young everyone was. They looked like high school boys, posing with no shirts on, holding heavy-looking guns, displaying Japanese flags that they had recovered from the bodies of soldiers that they had killed. All those boys, acting brave and cocky. I remember John pointing out in the photos who died and who had made it back.)

As for his letters, I only answered once or twice. It wasn’t personal, I just wasn’t much of a letter writer. I was always kind of self-conscious about my writing skills. And I was still engaged to Charlie, anyway. As these things tend to happen, John stopped writing right around the same time Charlie dropped me.

When the war ended and I heard that John was home, I expected to hear from him. I could’ve used an ego boost, a little cheering up, but he never came by. It had been a bad time for
my family. We lost my brother Tim at the Battle of the Bulge. We didn’t know how it happened or anything else, just that he was dead. That’s how they did things then. A goddamned telegram.

Then a month or so after V-J Day, John just appeared at the doorstep of my family’s house. He had seen the gold star up on our door and knew it was for Timmy. He wanted to stop by to pay his respects to my mother. We got to talking and I could tell he was still interested in me, though he was fighting it off.

Later he told me that he had promised himself that he wasn’t going to come see me, but when he saw the star, he knew he had to. We sat there in the front room of the old house and talked about Timmy, whom he had barely known.

When I asked John about what happened to him, he told me that he had been wounded on the island of Leyte in the Pacific, how the bullet entered the back of his ankle, how it wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to send him home because it would take so long to heal. He told me how while he was in the hospital, all the guys in his unit had gone down in a plane crash over the Pacific. When I told him how lucky he was, he called it his “million-dollar bullet hole.”

There was a quiet moment, then he said, “Why didn’t you write to me?”

“I was engaged to Charlie,” I said, afraid he would ask me that. “It didn’t seem right.”

“How is Charlie?”

I remember lowering my eyes to the faded floral print of the parlor rug, then finally up at him. “He’s living in Texas with his new wife.”

John looked at me and grinned. “Yeah, I know.”

That little shit knew all along that Charlie had dropped me. Anyway, we started seeing each other and that time it took.

I lean over and put my hand on John’s knee. He turns and looks at me. He smiles, but his eyes tell me that he is not all there at the moment.

Clines Corners is yet another tourist trap. We pull into the big trading post and I decide to look around a little. We could stand to pick up a few provisions and this place is as good as any.

Inside, there’s a restaurant along with the store, about the fortieth Route 66 Diner we’ve seen so far, all with the same old stuff—gas station signs, gas pumps, pictures of James Dean and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe with pink and neon and chrome and, of course, Route 66 signs. I have to say, this decor is getting a little tiresome. It’s like visiting the same place over and over.

I buy some cold Pepsis and a bag of Combos for John, while he fills up the tank. The man at the cash register hands me my change. Through the window behind him, I see John finishing up, getting back into the van. I remember that I didn’t take the keys this time. I cram the money in my purse,
grab the bag, then hustle on out there fast as my cane can support me, before John takes off.

“John!” I yell to him. He doesn’t hear, but when I finally get to the van, he’s waiting nice as you please. I, on the other hand, am exhausted and panting.

“You all right?” he says.

I glower at him over my glasses. “Fine,” I wheeze.

Back on 66, it’s much quieter. The landscape is strange, both green and brown, a shaggy blend of desert and forest, as if it can’t quite make up its mind what it wants to be. Nipping at the Pepsi, I start to feel a little better. When I go to put my change into my wallet, I notice someone has written something on one of the singles, on the border just above George Washington’s head:

god please get me a woman

I flip over the other side and it says:

give me relief

“Look at this,” I say to John.

John takes the bill, reads both sides, and frowns. “He’s barking up the wrong tree.”

“Smartass,” I say. Maybe he’s in better shape than I think today.