The Leisure Seeker (14 page)

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.

We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, which has become Scenic Road 333 instead of Ro>We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, wute 66. It is a gnarled, narrow road that lowers us into Tijeras Canyon, pulls us out, and then lowers us again. The walls of the canyon rise from the road, ridged and crenellated, covered with a burnt layer of brush. Everything looks weathered, shriveled, half-dead. It reminds me that we’re only a couple hundred miles from Alamogordo, where they tested the first A-bomb. It looks like it.

I know only too well about the effects of radiation, the barrenness it causes, all the good it’s supposed to do while it destroys. I have watched too many friends and relations wither and die, not from their disease, but from this alleged cure for their disease. That’s why I told Dr. Tom and all the rest of them that there no way they were going to use that stuff on me. The kids were all gung ho about aggressive treatment, but I told them: no radiation, no chemo, no nothing. The doctors seemed actually relieved. They don’t like using most of that stuff on old people, anyway. Of course, they don’t want you to go out and enjoy yourself, either. They just want you to rot in some hospital somewhere, while they do their tests on you and do everything humanly possible to keep you alive and uncomfortable for as long as possible; then when they feel like they’ve done everything they can, they send you home to die. I suppose they think that’s the best place to die. It probably is, for most people.

I decide we need some distraction. “John, let’s drive around Albuquerque a little bit, see what’s here. What do you say?”

“All right with me.”

We follow the business loop into the old section of town, where we have a gander at the Pueblo architecture, the old KiMo and El Rey movie theaters, and some crazy murals that look like they were painted by someone with a large supply of discomfort medication. Oh, and you better believe that there’s another Route 66 Diner. Gee, maybe there’s posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in there.

We climb Nine Mile Hill and in my rearview mirror, I watch Albuquerque diminish. We take the Old Town Bridge over the Rio Grande. The water below is dark and filthy. Down the road, I see a loose-planked white house with a Polack blue roof. On the side of the house, in block letters, it says:

L-A TRUCKERS CHURCH
ALLELUJA HE IS RISEN
SMOKE FREE BINGO
TUES 6:30

Good to know, I think.

We find a decent campground near a town called Grants. I’m happy to be settled in for the night, happy that our part of the campground is deserted. I’ve had enough of humanity to last me for a while.

John is suddenly perky, so he sets up the canopy and even drags a picnic table over for me to cook on. Once he turns the
place into a proper campsite, I start to relax. It’s a lovely afternoon, the air cooling down nicely.

Afterward, John plops down into one of our old aluminum lawn chairs with the frayed green-and-white webbing. (We bought them at the same time we got the Leisure Seeker thirty years ago, so I keep wondering when he’s going to bust right through one of them.) He’s reading that Louis L’Amour book again, though I haven’t seen him turn a page yet. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him holding it upside down sometime.

I set up the electric pan out on the picnic table and start frying bologna. I’m not really in the mood for it and I guarantee you that I shouldn’t be eating it, but I went through our little fridge and noticed that it was starting to turn. I’d hate for it to go bad, so it’s going to be dinner.

I split the edges of the slices so they don’t curl much, but once I put them on the frying pan, I don’t pay as much attention as I should and the pieces blacken on one side before I remember to flip them. I flop them onto some paper towel to drain the grease. Then I put them between slices of stale Wonder bread, slather on mustard, and serve it with the remains of an old bag of chips and some tepid pickles. All I can say for this meal is that it is quite thoroughly stale. Well done, Ella.

Yet when we sit down at the table, John is thrilled. He gobbles up his sandwich in a matter of minutes, then the other half of mine. I mix myself a manhattan, park myself next to him, take his hand, and we watch the sun set without saying a word.

Once it’s dark, the campground gets so damn quiet, I don’t know what to do with myself. At the table, John has dozed off next to me. “John, wake up,” I say. “You’re not going to be able to sleep tonight.”

He lifts his head, stares crossly at me. “What?”

“Come on. We’re going to watch slides.”

“It’s too late.” He starts to doze again.

I poke him in the shoulder. “Come on. It’s just past eight. If we go to bed now, we’ll be up at three in the morning. Get out the projector.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“I’ll show you. Put it on the picnic table and then we’ll have ice cream.”

“All right.” He lumbers up from the bench.

Food. It always works.

Tonight the pictures that we project on the side of our trailer are of our children, whom I miss so much, whom I’ve missed since they started leaving our home decades ago. Although we never exactly intended to do it, we have a tray of slides culled from other trays, a mishmash, entirely of the kids. It allows us to watch our children grow up in the space of about ten minutes, though not necessarily in the correct order. It’s like the Greatest Hits of the Robinas.