All I Have in This World (8 page)

Pudgy, bald, breath so odiferous no amount of mouthwash or toothpaste could disguise it. Annie would long since have sold off all but the two acres housing the center and his equally run-down farmhouse to developers and loggers.

Better to be snakebit or shot for the laces in his shoes than wither like that. He stoked his wretched fantasy to distract himself from dangers present if not exactly clear until, after a mile or two of blacktop, he was swept up by the Border Patrol. A Mexican officer and a white one. They had him down on the pavement, spread-eagled, his pockets turned out, the useless flashlight confiscated.

“A late-model F-150?” said the Mexican officer when at last they allowed him to stand. “Two miles from the border? Keys under the seat?”

Both officers laughed. “You leave a plate of tamales steaming on the hood, too?” said the Mexican. “String a green card from the rearview?”

Marcus had no idea what they were talking about and it must have shown.

“Mexicans love a F-150,” said the Mexican.

“Aren't you Mexican?” said Marcus, before he could stop himself.

“You think all brown people are Mexican?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I just thought, us being right here on the border and all . . .”

“Let's say I
am
Mexican. That'd mean I'd be able to say shit like I just said.”

Marcus nodded agreeably, even as he wondered how a Mexican, even one born in this country, even one hard up for a job where jobs seemed scarce, could sign up to catch people fleeing from unimaginable poverty and the threat of daily violence in order to live ten to a one-bedroom apartment in some shitty part of, say, Topeka or Charlotte, taking jobs so low paying even the American underclass would not stoop to take them. But this did not seem the right time or place to raise this question.

“What was in the truck?” asked the white officer.

After Marcus listed the contents, the Mexican officer said, “You might get some of that back. Might turn up in some draw, since it sounds like a load of junk. So what the fuck were you thinking?”

Unthinking
was the only word Marcus could come up with for what led him to the backseat of the patrol car. Keys were easy to lose and hard to find if you had to tote them everywhere you went. He'd always left his keys in his truck at the farm. He'd not locked the doors to his truck or his house in years. He could not recall locking up even when he stopped for food and lodging on the way down. Since he could not remember consciously choosing one way or the other, maybe his unthinkingness was part of his dramatic surrender to the elements.

“I guess I wasn't,” he said to the officers, who ignored him, having already made up their minds about him. Ferrying him back to town, they decided between them that the park ranger was to blame.

“Motherfucker set him up,” said the white officer. “Sending him down there this time of day? Knowing what's kicking around out there just waiting on a chance?”

“Either that or Ranger Rick's still thinking like an Eagle Scout. ‘Why, this is a delightful stroll through the natural habitat,' ” the Mexican officer said in a girly falsetto.

For the rest of the trip, the agents ragged on the Park Service with a hatred Marcus suspected was common to government agencies with slightly overlapping jurisdictions. Hours later, after paperwork had been filed desultorily by a sleepy clerk, he walked the two miles from Border Patrol headquarters back to his hotel, stood in the rusty shower stall until all the hot water was gone, and fell into bed. He woke early to the music of a waking town indifferent to his straits. Beep of backing-up delivery trucks and Tejano music blaring from passing traffic. Just after nine he called the Border Patrol to check on his truck.

“No word,” said the man on the other end of the line.

“What do you think the chances are it will turn up?”

“If it were me?” said the man, who had a lilting Hispanic accent, which made Marcus trust what he was about to say, even had he not started his sentence with “If it were me,” which Marcus chose to believe implied sincerity rather than egotism. “If it were me I'd go ahead and file with the insurance.”

“So you're saying basically no chance?” Marcus usually avoided the word “basically,” which was both overused and obvious, but there was something basic about his situation that allowed him to make an exception.

“I'm saying if you need a ride somewhere, it would be best to get your insurance to pay for you a rental. Or go on ahead and buy you something new. If we'd've found it, it would have been within a couple hours of you reporting it, and you didn't report it for at least a couple hours after it got jacked, am I correct?”

“Well, see, I had to walk up to the road. My phone was in the truck.”

“You might better get yourself a new phone, too.”

“Wouldn't it be better to wait a few days?”

“If it were me I would not wait if it meant not having no truck and no phone.”

“Well, I guess if it turns up I can always get my money back for my new phone and my new ride.”

“I would not put too much into thinking what you are going to do when it turns up. That's just me, though. You can do what you want.”

After Marcus thanked him and hung up, he had already decided he would like to be the man who answered the phone at the Border Patrol because the man had seemed so sure of what he would do if it were he. Marcus was never all that sure what to do in most circumstances, and he felt particularly anxious about what to do in his present circumstances. So he took another shower and sat naked on the couch making lists, the first of which was titled

All I Have in This World

• jeans 3 2

• shorts I never wear because I read somewhere men over forty ought not to wear shorts or sandals

• work boots (one pair) and running shoes (one pair)

• several faded pocket tees and one button-down, frayed collar

• socks and underwear for three days

• my health, praise be

• bottle of passable zinfandel

• toiletries (I hate that word)

• a not insubstantial roll of purloined cash

And then on a separate but equally yellow page of legal pad:

Most Pressing Needs

• transportation

• warmer threads for high desert nights

• cheaper and maybe longer-term digs

• gainful employment

• redemption

• breakfast

• flytrap seeds locked in the glove compartment

• that song “Badge” by Cream, so I can crank up the part that goes, “I told you not to wander around in the dark / I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park / I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel”

• because I do not deserve native cuisine, having behaved unthinkingly, a greasy grilled cheese with chips and a Coke?

• call Annie?

Marcus got dressed and, in a diner down the street from the hotel, slightly revised his list by ticking off lunch first in the form of a BLT and cheddar, a tolerable substitute for grilled cheese, before moving on to “transportation.”

W
HEN
M
ARIA SAID SHE
needed a car, her mother said, “You can use the Cherokee.” When Maria said that she needed her own car, that she did not want to have to depend on her mother, that her mother had far too much to do to taxi her around town, her mother said she wished she would have known, she let one of the girls at the motel who wrecked her car have Ray's truck.

“Good,” said Maria. “I know she appreciated it.”

“But here I gave it away and now you're needing it.”

“I have some money saved up,” said Maria, but she was wondering, again, was this the thing that would bring back the tensions of their past? That her mother had been so accommodating, in her terse way, about her plans for the restaurant only made Maria more anxious. More likely the falling-out would occur over something like a cereal bowl allowed to sit unwashed in the sink until supper, which her mother, scrubbing hardened flakes from the bottom of the bowl, would see as emblematic of Maria's unworthiness.

“Let me call one of the Keplers. They went to school with your daddy. They run a used lot off Presidio Street. Bobby, I believe, is the younger one. He'll do you a good deal, I bought the Cherokee from him.”

Maria knew better than to turn down her mother's offer. This was the way it worked here. If you wanted something, you called someone you went to school with or married the cousin of or worked with at the Dairy Queen in high school. Besides, what did she know about buying a car? She'd never owned one. She'd always taken the bus or walked. Randy loved cars. He drove a Nova. Endless and incomprehensible was the list of modifications he'd made to the stock engine, and the fact that she even knew to say “modifications” or “stock” was shocking to her after so many years. But since she had been back, all sorts of details had shown up from somewhere she feared forever lost. She remembered the hours Randy and his cousins and his friends spent crawling around under cars on oily concrete slabs. She'd head over to his house after school and there he would be, in the drive, cut off to the waist, his head swallowed by the gaping hood. Good God, the hours wasted while Randy talked cars with her father. From her bedroom window she'd see Randy pull into the drive, and her father would be out watering or tinkering under the carport, and Randy would barely have the door open before her father would sweep up on him, and through the open window she'd hear her father say, “Okay, Rand, let's see what all you did to her last weekend.” Then the pop of the hood latch, the creak the hood made as it rested its weight on the rod that propped it open, and she knew it would be thirty minutes before Randy would ever make it into the house, and most of the time he would not make it, she'd have to go out and stand around while Randy and her dad spoke a language made up entirely of car-part names and the histrionic verbs of sports writers, which they used to describe either the things their cars had done or the things they wanted them to do, along with sound effects that would have made her laugh had she not been so bored.

Later, alone in the car, she would make fun of him for caring so much about something so inconsequential and he would grin as if this was all he wanted in the world, a woman to stay on his case night and day for the next sixty years. But she did not want that. She did not want to nag, and so why couldn't he stop doing those things that caused her to nag?

“Just come over a half hour early,” she said to him once. “Like, if we're supposed to be somewhere at seven, come at six thirty and talk your boring car talk with him until seven. That way we can be on time.”

Randy said she was cracking him up, telling him when to show up and how long he could talk about the thing he loved besides her.

“But you love me more, don't you?”

“More than my ride?” Randy pretended to give it thirty seconds of thought. “It's in a different column, a car and a girl.”

“What are you talking about, a column?”

“Like at school when they make you classify things in lists. And you have to put up top of the column what the category is.”

“So you have a column for girls and one for cars?”

“Not
girls, girl. Girl
without an
s.
But yeah,
cars
plural because I like more than one car and I plan on owning way more than this one. Unlike in the girl column.”

“Are you saying you own me?”

“Yeah, Maria. I purchased you at Dollar General. I still got the receipt, so maybe you better stop picking at me, trying to trap me into saying something stupid, like I want more than one girl or I own you or some shit like that.”

They were pulling into the parking lot of Dairy Queen, where they would waste another night leaning on cars with their friends. Maria had wanted to go see a movie or something, anything but hang out for hours at Dairy Queen, and maybe her boredom was what caused her to be so prickly that night.

“I'm not trying to trap you. You were the one who started talking about columns. You know you love me more than all the items in your stupid car column. So why don't you show it?”

“By coming to pick you up a half hour early, you mean? By cutting your daddy off in the middle of a sentence just because you're ready to go?”

“For God's sake, don't you dare disrespect Daddy by not finishing a sentence y'all have already exchanged six thousand times. No telling what he might do.”

“Your daddy is a good man.”

“I wouldn't know. He hardly ever talks to me. Why should he? I couldn't point out a carburetor if my life depended.”

“Good thing your life don't, then.”

Maria got out of the car and went inside and sat in a booth with her friends, and Randy stayed outside in the parking lot, sitting on a lawn chair in the back of his best friend Johnny's pickup all night and glaring at her through the streaky plate glass. Finally Maria grew tired of her friends and their conversation and she went outside and announced to Randy that she was ready to go, and all his friends looked in another direction because it was obvious that Randy and Maria were “in a fight.”

On the way home, Randy said, “Why do you have to be like this, you know I love you to pieces,” but she did not say anything even when he pulled into the driveway. As she knew he would, he left what he called “some rubber” on the highway in front of her drive. The next day at school she pushed a note into the slot of his locker that read, “We broke up,” and after the next class, she found a note in her locker that said, “No,
WE
didn't break up,
YOU
broke up.” Both “
WE
” and “
YOU
” were underlined so angrily that the lines punctured the page. The next class, biology, they had together. She did not look at him but she could feel him in the back row with his friends, slumped in his desk chair, the anger coming off him like the flame under the Bunsen burners. After three days of this—Randy calling her house nightly, Maria telling her mother and father she did not want to speak to him, her mother telling Maria, “I'm not going to lie for you. If you want me to tell him you're not here you better go off somewhere,” and her father asking her what was going on, why was she mad at Randy, what in the world had happened—Randy dispatched her best friend, Connie, to argue his case.