All I Have in This World

The town was small, and so was the boy. His name was Randy and he was Maria's size exactly. They fit together tongue and groove, which to Maria, who at seventeen had never had a boyfriend, meant that it was meant.

Because he was too wispy to play football, a near requirement of every boy with a pulse in their small West Texas high school, Randy devoted himself to auto mechanics. At sixteen, his fingernails were oil-blackened and his jeans smelled of exhaust. Maria had never given one second to the thought of a car. To her mind a car moved you from one place to the next, essential in the immense county where she lived, but hardly anything to get excited about. Still, when she and Randy hugged beneath the bleachers during the football game on Friday nights, she felt her body covered by his, exactly covered, and his interests were of no consequence. She made him pink ham and rat cheese sandwiches, which they ate in the Airstream parked behind her house. No one in Maria's family went inside the Airstream, and only in late fall and winter was it even possible to enter it, since her father had long ago disconnected the air-conditioning, and open windows were useless in the heat of day.

It bothered Randy that the Airstream sat unused, probably because it had wheels and therefore qualified as automotive.

“I'd take this sucker everywhere,” he said one day after school. She had fixed him a ham and cheese. He liked extra mayonnaise. Maria preferred mustard, though she did not care for the squirt bottles her mother bought, which made a noise that quelled her appetite.

“Like where would you take this sucker?”

“Grand Canyon.”

“We went once to Big Bend in it. And I think I remember going to the campground at Balmorhea.”

“We could get in the car right now and be in either of those places before dark.”

“Your point?” Maria said, though she knew what his point was. She said this to Randy all the time because it drove him crazy. He would pick her up for school in the morning and say, “We need to stop on the way to town to get gas,” and she would say, “And your point is?”

“My point is get your butt over here.” He pulled her up from the tiny booth, littered with his half-eaten sandwich and their half-empty glasses of Pepsi, and led her to the bed in the back of the Airstream. Even though the Airstream was shut tight against the wind, dust found its way inside. Dust on the mattress, dust on the blinds, dust coating the ceiling, which was bare and silver, her father having yanked out the upholstery years ago because it had started to sag.

It wasn't as if they were unaccustomed to dust. Sometimes at night Randy drove her out to the end of Golf Course Road, where they parked the car at the turnaround and strolled out onto the pastureland of the Weil ranch. He liked to claim a plane had gone down just over a rise and was still filled with sacks of drug money. “You silly boy,” she would say when he went on about downed planes and unclaimed treasure. He needn't have white-lied to recline next to her on the dry-rotted tarp they'd pulled from the floor of her garage. The tarp smelled of spilled oil, but the roughness of the sand her father had spread to soak up the oil beat the prick of cactus and cocklebur. Stars shot across the night sky so slowly she could nearly narrate their passage. From far down the valley came the faint whistle of the train to El Paso; nearby, a sudden rustling that both knew but neither admitted was a snake.

Inside the Airstream that never went anywhere, Maria and Randy made out for so long their lips were raw, their cheeks reddened. At first, out on the ranch under the night sky, their kisses had been tentative and clumsy, but once the newness had worn off they became aggressive, frenzied, as if force might make up for lack of experience. Maria had seen strangers in movies drawn together by lightning-quick chemistry and she tried to mimic the soft/loud lip brush and tongue plunge she saw on the screen, but to fully master such required the assistance of her partner, whose impatience with the softer verse she preferred to interpret as passion.

Soon they were sliding against each other on the vinyl in only their underwear. When Maria discarded her bra for the first time, Randy, not wanting to acknowledge it (she supposed because he feared she might put it back on if he even changed his expression), clamped his mouth on one nipple and then the other. To Maria's mindânot to mention her bodyâRandy overtended to her breasts, as if this step were crucial to perfect before moving on to the next. It made little sense to her, given his rushed kisses. Maria thought about stopping him to say, And your point is?

This made her smile, then laugh a little. Randy raised his head to look at her as she imagined a baby might when a nursing was interrupted.

“What?” he said, smiling in a way that barely hid his worry that she was about to tell him he was doing it wrong.

“It tickles a little,” she said.

“Well, good, that's good,” said Randy. “It's supposed to.”

He went back to work. Maria ran her fingers through his hair, tucked a strand of it behind an ear. It occurred to her that they were two children playing in a camper behind a house after school let out but before their parents came home from work. Randy tasted like mayonnaise. But was it not also true that they could say to each other with their bodies, I want this part to be over, I want to move on to the next part? With their bodies there were ways to leave the Airstream, home, Texas. She pulled him up to her and she kissed him and she slid him off her so she could slip off her panties. She gave him two minutes to explore her with his fingers and then she told him to take his boxers off. She waved him forward. Dawdling grade-schooler at the crosswalk, weighted down with textbooks, your poor back bent, let me help you out of that backpack, I will lighten you, I will see you safely across.

“I don't have one,” he said, hovering above her, his arms locked as if he was about to do a push-up.

“At least you didn't say that word. I hate that word.”

“What word?”

“What y'all call them. Actually I hate every other word for them, too.”

But they would use them after this first time except for a few occasions when someone's mother was in line at the drugstore, or when the men's room at the Fina stationâwhere there was a machineâwas occupied for what seemed like a century. She would not let him name or even comment on it as he tore open the wrapper with his teeth and took his time unrolling it.

“I trust you,” she said, unlocking his arms at the elbows and pulling him onto her, and she did, mostly because they were equal in their inexperience. When would that ever happen again? When would she ever be with someone and not have the touch of past lovers to compare his with? When would the burst she'd heard about but never felt (though she knew, she'd heard, that it got better, longer, even more explosive) ever equal the unknown trajectory of her first?

The ceiling of the Airstream, so starkly silver, was not the night sky of the pasture, so slow with stars. It might not have been
where
but it was
when.
And when he finally pushed inside her and they both gasped at its fit, she felt they had stumbled upon something they both could learn from. As they pushed against, away from, and farther into each other, she hoped that soonânot now, but in a whileâthey would discover a new beauty, they would learn how friction, the slightest strife, could lead to a pleasure terrifying but also somehow containable. Not today, but soon, she and Randy might also arrive at some common understanding of what in this world might matter most, and together they would find in their hearts a special chamber where they could worship these most meaningful things.

For the next two months they did it in the Airstream, out on the Weil ranch on the oily tarp, twice at thrilling risk in the band room after school, even on a field trip to a water park near San Antonio. And then their story grew so familiar and ancient that it might have been written on crinkly parchment or charcoaled across the wall of a cave.

Only after years away from home did Maria accept the notion that her predicament was not original, that such things have happened to people across time continuous, and she no longer felt the sting of the word her mother used to describe it: “unthinking.” It was not incorrect, her mother's word, for surely some other factor besides the intellect ruled her time with Randy until, after touching her forehead to the porcelain for the fourth day in a row, she admitted to herself that the only way they truly fit was anatomically.

Randy wanted to drop out of school and go to work at his uncle's body shop and learn to play bass so he could join this band Rockfish his buddy Johnny Rodriquez had put together. He spoke about a standing Saturday night gig at Railroad Blues down in Alpine as if it were surefire stardom. He was so excited by the life he described for himself that Maria, loath to disappoint anyone, nearly went along with it. But the night she took the test, they had driven sixty miles to Skyline Drive and below them the lights of Fort Davis blinked before the valley fell away to empty and desolate ranchland, and each twinkling light reminded her of all the people who hardly ever left this valley. “Unthinking” turned out to be the word that saved her, for she thought about what she would say, and yet no matter how much time she had devoted to saying it gently and no matter how much she knew that this was the kinder choice to all involved parties, she could not bear to look at his face when she told him she wanted to go away to college and get, eventually, her master's degree in deaf education.

Maria's father, Mexican and deeply Catholic even if during Mass he could often be found breakfasting with his buddies at Alicia's CafÃ©, knew nothing of her predicament, much less how she chose to deal with it. It was he who, a week after that night atop Skyline Drive, came home to find Randy's car in the drive and his body behind the Airstream. Maria and her mother were on their way back from the clinic in El Paso when it happened, and for yearsâeven though she knew it did not matterâshe wondered where they were in their journey when Randy pulled the trigger.

Junction, Texas, 2004

His third day on the road to Mexico, somewhere west of San Antonio on I-10, Marcus Banks noticed, for the first time since relinquishing his property to the Bank of America, the world outside the window of his truck. Or perhaps it was the landscape that noticed him and announced itself, arid and tawny, as the opposite of the farm he'd fled in the lush sea-level swamplands of southeastern North Carolina. Even though he had not yet crossed the border, looking out the window, he felt as if he'd escaped.

He passed through Sonora and Ozona, after which the towns dried up and the gnarled oaks were replaced by even more stunted scrub. Near Fort Stockton he decided to get off the interstate and take a back road toward Presidio, where he could cross over into Chihuahua instead of going all the way west to El Paso and entering the country through JuÃ¡rez as planned. The sunset made the land appear slightly less parched. Miles of nothing much but tufts of some vegetation unknown to him, mountains so distantly shrouded he decided they belonged to Mexico. The only sign of settlement he saw was an abandoned homestead, its windmill rusted to a stop above a long-dry stock tank, cabin and outbuildings beaten by wind, dirt, time everlasting.

Would that nature take his farmhouse as quickly. After loading up his pickup two nights earlier, he'd sat for hours in the kitchen, drinking bourbon and listening to mice skitter behind the walls. Dusk inched closer across the side yard and he switched on a lamp and stared at the yellow cone it diced from the coming darkness. Dust swirled in the lamplight. Another galaxy to which he was blind. There had been a woman, named Rebecca, who left him because of his inability to recognize any universe other than his own.

Drinking bourbon in his farmhouse that last night, his pickup packed and ready, he had reminded himself that whatever happened inside his heart, the world continued apace. Nature was on its way. Just beyond the kitchen, Virginia creeper curled up the downspout. Kudzu sent its snaky tendrils almost perceptibly out of the dark-mouthed woods. He damn near prayed that as soon as his truck disappeared up the sandy two-track, the farmhouse would be wrestled to the ground by sapling and vine. Already it was giving way, for in the darkness either the mice grew in number or squirrels and possibly raccoons and possums joined them in the secret spaces of his farmhouse. Next the stray mongrels would come sniffing up from the swamp, black bears irascible and sluggish in early spring, ever-abundant deer, copperheads, corn snakes, diamondbacks, a few beautifully banded but deadly corals. Bored teenagers who had a nose for derelict structures would arrive with warm beer and aerosol cans of paint. May those teens be the last humans ever to set foot in his farmhouse, and may it instantly revert to what they called the elements. He owed those elements a sacrifice, the mighty fortress of his ruin.

Of course at dawn the next morning, when his head was free of sour mash, he accepted the fact that someone representing the bank would arrive in a few hours to assess the property it now owned. By that time he would be well on his way to Mexico. He had a long-standing offer to stay with an old friend from graduate school who had also failed to put to use his degree in history and joined the expat enclave of San Miguel de Allende. Thousands of miles behind him would be the farmhouse and those acres of swamp and scrub and pine forest to which he had retreated in his late thirties with a plan to profit from the sale of a plant native only to his property and a few thousand contiguous acres, not to mention realize his dream of building a museum to educate the world about the Venus flytrap.

Six years earlier, when he first started the flytrap enterprise, he had called his older sister, Annie, who lived three hundred miles west in Asheville. Though she co-owned the property with him, she rarely visited the farm. It was only right to consult her, though he suspected he would be annoyed by her reaction to his plan, which turned out to be true.

“Don't they grow wild?”

“Yes, but there's not nearly enough for us to make money off. I could harvest what's out there in a few day's time. I'm talking about an operation that would supply not only flytraps but all the other carnivorous plants to wholesalers all over the country.”

“So, using greenhouses, you mean?”

“Sure,” said Marcus, though in fact he had no plans to grow his traps in greenhouses. He had no use for a greenhouse, hated its look, its design, most of all what it represented, which was cheating, an attempt to circumvent nature. Growing his traps in greenhouses seemed contradictory to the very purpose of his educational center, which was to celebrate the fact that the plant grew wild only in the very region where his ancestors had settled in the mid-eighteenth century.

“I don't know, Marcus,” said Annie. “You think you can pull this off ?”

“It's not like we're doing anything with the land but sitting on it until we die and our heirs parcel it off and sell it to developers.”

“What heirs would those be? I'm gay and you're getting too old to have a child.”

“Gay people have children now, Annie. So do old people.”

“I realize that gay people have children, Marc. I think I know more gay people than you do. It's just that I don't want a child,” she said. “If you want one, though, I would support you. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” he said, though he had no idea what she meant by support. Offer moral guidance? Financial assistance? As far as he knew, his sister changed jobs as often as she did girlfriends. They did not talk much, but every time they did, a new name cropped up. She was living with June, she had to go because she and Lucia were having a party, Molly wrecked her car.

“Anyway, even if there were heirs, if it were up to me, I'd have sold it yesterday. The only thing worth anything is that shack you live in.”

Actually, the logging rights were worth quite a bit of money, given the demand for cypress of a certain age and size, but he did not share that because Annie had more than once voiced her opinion that primogeniture belonged to her even if she was female.

“Wait: Didn't you just say something about developers? Is someone interested in developing it?”

“Actually, no,” he said. “I mean, no one besides me.”

“Well, maybe you could put it out there that the land is available? I mean, if the flytrap thing doesn't work. Actually, I'm a little strapped, to be honest.”

“What exactly is your occupation right now?”

“You go first.”

“Entrepreneur,” he said.

“There's a lot of that going around these days,” said Annie. “Though I have never figured out what it means. Up here I think it means you're cooking meth in your trailer.”

“I'm peddling plants,” he said, “but they're fantastical, not medicinal.”

“Well, as long as you can make money off it, and as long as any money you do lose, I mean if you happen to lose any, comes out of your half, I mean, what am I going to do? Come down there and plant some hydroponic lettuce?”

“So is that a yes?”

“You should call Mom, Marc,” said Annie. “She told me the other day she hadn't heard from you in six months.”

“I called her on her birthday. A matter of weeks, actually. She's not so good at math.”

“Let's hope
you
are,” said Annie.

Marcus did not feel bad lying to his sister about the greenhouses because she clearly had no interest in anything but collecting a check. He felt no compunction to share with her his plans to build the educational center, either, for that part of the plan he was sure she would have an opinion aboutâthe word
nonprofit,
he suspected, would get her attentionâbut since he had not even broken ground for his museum at that point, it seemed premature to alarm her.

So he signed contracts to provide wholesalers with his traps and he planted not only flytraps but pitchers and butterworts and all the other varieties of carnivorous plants that thrived in the swamps on his property. His first crop, the yield was pitiful. Everything that might align against him did so swiftly and with no mercy. A killing frost late in the season took away all that he'd planted. Deer and feral pigs feasted on the seedlings. Most worrisome were the poachers who came in the night or for all Marcus knew in the broadness of the day, sneaking in while he was in town or having lunch on his porch, the sort of desperadoes who yanked copper wire from nearly finished houses to sell on the black market for money he assumed went into their arms or bellies.

Even had his business thrived, the not-for-profit center itself would have floundered. Though there were dozens of reasons for its failure, he still had a hard time believing that he had built a shrine and no one had come. He liked to remind himself that the location was remote, miles from any interstate, in a region of the country so besotted with swamp and river and sound that roads, based on old stagecoach routes, were circuitous, and routes to the center managed to elude even MapQuest. But it was for the center that Marcus had borrowed the brunt of the loans, and he'd been wasteful from the start, conducting research with a month-long road trip around the country to visit similar sites. Any nonprofit whose aim it was to provide information about nature to the public made his list, and there were a surprising number of them: museums devoted to rice, to corn, to kudzu, cacti, redwoods, wildflowers, even pine trees. Because this was business and he planned to write the entire excursion off on his taxes, he had been foolishly extravagant, forgoing campsites and the mom-and-pop motels for more luxurious accommodations with fitness centers, minibars, wireless access.

He never got around to telling Annie about the center even after the structureâa geodesic dome that was Marcus's only concession to the idea of a greenhouse, given that he needed the light for his exhibits and he had long been a fan of Buckminster Fullerâwas completed. One day she would show up for a visit and discover it nestled among the pines just off the highway. What a surprise it would be for her, the dome glinting in the afternoon light, the buses parked in their own special lot.

But she did not come, and he did not worry about her because there were dozens of other things to consider even after the center was built. He certainly never figured that creating a museum called for the expertise of those whose sole job it was to design exhibits. Only when his plans proved both crude and without substance, the copy he wrote to accompany them formless, rambling, and short on actual fact, did he succumb to looking up such professionals on the Internet.

He settled on a woman from Washington, since the district had not only the most museums, but the best. He did not like her from the moment he saw her. She was humorless and inappropriately shod. When he explained that they would be walking in the woods, she asked about snakes and said she was particularly sensitive to mosquitoes. Finally she asked to use his restroom and emerged dressed in a vest of many pockets that one might wear while trout fishing or on safari.

The rest of the day was miserable with questions Marcus not only could not answer but deemed maddeningly literal. They sat at his kitchen table, two floor fans trained on them, for she declared herself overly sensitive to humidity and could not believe he did not have air-conditioning. Air-conditioning to Marcus was like a greenhouse. He started to explain why but stopped himself from such a futile task.

“What do you want the public to know?” asked the woman, whose name was Carrie, though she introduced herself as Dr. Elwood. He did not ask what he wanted to ask: Doctor of what, exactly? Exhibit design? Having spent some time in the halls of academe, he knew better than to disparage the pursuit of a high degree in a subject obscure or obsolete. But he refused to call her, or anyone else who did not set bones or dispense drugs, Doctor.

“I want them to know all about the carnivorous plant,” he said, as if this was understood.

“Right,” she said, smirking at the screen of her laptop, which she claimed to have brought along to show him some of her work. “But you need to be more specific if we are to come up with specialized and targeted exhibits.”

After a pause, he said he thought the word
leach
was crucial to his mission.

“Leech? As in what primitive medicine believed to be a panacea?”

Marcus laughed, mostly at her diction.

“No,” he said. “ L-e-a-c-h. As in the soil my plants grow in is so acidic that it leaches the earth of nutrients. Most plants can't survive in this habitat because they are deprived of ingredients essential to their health.”

She was nodding now, Carrie Elwood. “Such as?”

“Nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium.”

“Okay, good,” she said, clacking away on her keyboard. “That's a start. But I'm not sure why you emphasize the term
leach.
Especially since it is hardly an attractive word, even if it is a homophone.”

Marcus stifled a sigh at the word
homophone.

“I emphasize it because the very elements we need to survive are taken away from us by life itself.” I, too, can fill the room with pretentiousness and pedantry, Marcus realized, though it seemed silly to be playing this game, given the amount he was overpaying her.

She studied him over the top of her computer as if he was a student in one of her classes who had said something so off the mark that it was worth pursuing, though only to kill time until the bell rang.

“What elements are those?”

“Most crucial is the ability to connect with other people.”

“Love?”

“Not even. The capacity to merge your reality with someone else's version of same.”

“I'm not following you. What does this have to do with the Venus flytrap?”

Now Marcus was just irritated. But more than irritated, he was deeply amused.

“It's not that complicated a metaphor. Nature made us a kind of kingdom unto ourselves. The natural world plants us in our habitat but then it leaches the soil surrounding us of sustenance essential to our subsistence, if not survival. But the flytrap, in the harshest of circumstances, perseveres.”

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