Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo (24 page)

“Do you want to stop?” she said.

He shrugged.

“Just give it a chance,” Maya said. “For me.”

They banged the planks in pursuit of the seniors. Maya told herself to calm down. She heard Alex—she was frantic, and doing her best to make sure her son was, too. In the harsh clarity of the surroundings, she saw herself harshly and clearly: She spent her days waiting for ill news of her son, and had now set to demanding
it. Her fright was so pervasive that it was no longer exceptional; its absence was exceptional. But she had not felt its absence since the day he ran off to the creek. Was she turning into a hypochondriac like a good Rubin? They lived in expectation of danger and setback, even walked accordingly, a slight stoop in deference to the axe that would swing. She hated herself for always trying to hold the Rubins responsible.

After Max had vanished in June, Maya gave twenty nights to racking dreams involving a gang of small, malevolent boys peering into the glass on either side of the front door of the house—urinating on the doorframe, banging on the glass, sticking their tongues out, though never attempting to enter. Sometimes, in the dream, she confronted them—so large was her fury that once she leaped from the second story down to the foyer, a drop of ten feet. This scattered them from the window, but her sleep remained fitful. When it worked, she dreamed of the boys. The only way to stop the dream was to wake up, but then she was up at three thirty, four, a wreck at the hospital, misplacing plates and X-raying the wrong breast.

She wanted to stop fearing. Did that mean that she had wanted the trip for herself, as Alex had said? No, she had wanted to give Max the gift of native feeling, for Maya was on intimate terms with its absence, knew its constant sensation of slight poisoning, of living in error. It was sprung on Maya right at Soviet customs. “Anything to declare, little sister?” a barbarous face in a uniform sneered at her. Only carefree thoughts and a sense of belonging.

So what if the larger box of this gift to Max contained, like a nesting doll, the smaller box of a gift for herself? Some gift: She would feel twice as odd in Montana as she did in New Jersey, all so her boy, so ill at ease in New Jersey, might feel at home. She was increasing their alienation from one unit apiece to two for Maya and zero for Max. So that when Rose Holliver asked what kind of bird that was, Maya expected, as if she was dealing with a mechanical spring rather than a boy's brain, that Max, bright with an un
familiar ease, would answer. How simple she was; how hopelessly rigid her thinking. On a switch, he would become new? She really thought so—and it was her husband who had to correct her, in the grass earlier that morning. How much patience, after all, Alex had for her. She despised herself—in addition to fear, she lived according to a constant diminution of wits.

Maya stared off at the magpies, black specks wheeling against the sandstone, a burning gold shading to bone-white in the glare of the sun. In her years at university, Maya could not pass a bird without demanding its name from the person next to her. This bird, that type of arch, those curlicues on the railing. She wanted to know the proper names for things; the prospect of filling these vacancies was ravenously satisfying. Anton the metalhead, Jeremiah the black Buddhist, her exotically named roommates Soraya and then Philomene and then Soraya again—had laughed at their peculiar lover and friend. They did not know what those things were called, and they did not care.

Maya watched the shaking backsides of the seniors before her. They knew what things were called. Even if they had gotten this one answer wrong, they knew. The only thing they did not know was what it was like not to know.

+

It was in the campground's sclerotic showers, tauntingly situated within sight of the Ridgeline Motel, which, undoubtedly, offered doors on its showers, that Maya felt the full measure of that singular despair reserved for travelers and travelers alone. It is the despair of losing home and all that is familiar, a despair whose known temporariness allays none of the feeling. The bed, with its uncustomary sighs and creaks, is as welcoming as a cold hand in the gloom, no matter how tiring the journey; the view, even if of spellbinding peaks, is an affront; the smells of the street are the smells of people who make themselves at home in a different way. The whole world is a language the traveler does not speak. The
soul, blind to reason, is bereaved. The soul—the part of the self where one is most honest, as Maya Rubin explained to her son—is
bereaved
; the life that's been taken from it is its own. By undertaking the trip, the soul has engaged in a lie, and, therefore, for the trip's duration, died off.

All this is doubly so for the immigrant, who does not realize the tenuousness of his hold on the originally adopted home until he has cavalierly relinquished it in the service of . . . what? Scrubbing herself with an animal's urgency under a lukewarm trickle from a showerhead speckled with rust, Maya was forced to ask herself the question Alex had been asking, if only she would listen: Why were they here? Rather, why
here
, in this awful dusty campground rimmed by signs about rattlesnakes? She tried to persuade herself that this was simply that American obsession with indemnification; who would build a campground in a spot beloved by rattlesnakes?

Maya was frantic for pleasure. She turned toward the wall, ran her fingers toward her crotch, and rubbed with desperation, the water cascading off her shoulders and sluicing between her breasts. Despite the avidness with which she worked, her orgasm was as far away as New Jersey. She tried to think of Alex, but it didn't work.

She thought of the man from the diner, Marion. Maya, the weaver of fairy tales, altered the morning's events: Outside they had decided that they wanted takeout breakfast; Maya returned to the diner, placed the order, decided she needed the bathroom herself. Marion said he would show her where, she said she knew, but he slipped off his stool and followed her anyway. Their eyes locked in a strange way. He followed her inside. The bathroom was cramped—eating places always saved money on bathrooms.

“What now?” she said.

“You have to go to the bathroom,” he said, nodding at the toilet.

She hiked up her sundress, the one with the mother-of-pearl buttons running down the front, pulled her underwear down to her ankles, and lowered herself onto the seat. Maya's heart was beating fast in the shower, and also on the toilet seat, so it took
her some time. When a stream finally hit the toilet water, Marion leaned down and kissed her mouth as one of his hands reached underneath her. The yellow water hit his fingers; he held them there. As it slowed to a trickle, he closed his hand over her and held her this way while they kissed.

Then he lifted her by the arms, turned her around, and led her palms to the rough paint of the wall. He kissed the back of her neck and undid the front buttons from behind her back, his fingers still wet. She took one hand off the wall and fished for him, but he knocked it back. Soon the dress was unbuttoned and on the floor around her feet. She felt him sliding inside from behind. She was tight and he moved slowly, opening her, until she felt him fully inside of her—she felt his waist pressed to her ass. She scratched the wall with her nails. She asked to look at him.

He ignored her at first but then turned her to face him and lifted her slightly until she was wedged in the tiny alcove that had been hacked for the sink. It had been hacked for her—her torso fit with an inch on each side. She held the faucets for support. Kiss me, she said, and this time he listened. Her hands moved to his face. He entered and withdrew slowly as they kissed, the sharpness of the initial encounter changed into something gentler and pensive.

It was then, near the moment of crisis, that an ominous clang went through the shower pipes imprisoned behind the wall and the trickle turned arctic, eliciting a yelp from Maya and forcing her to finish sooner than she wanted. She shuddered once and stepped out. In the parcel of space the cursed architect had sectioned off for a dressing room, two women were silently toweling themselves. She inspected them for detection, or solidarity, or both. They offered neither. They rubbed their tired, bloated bodies with inanimate rhythm, exercised by a million showers, tilting their hips, arching their asses, kinking their shoulders, lost in private illusion. They could not offer Maya even the camaraderie of fellow shipwrecks. But Maya had the wealth of her secret, still sending
warmth down her legs, which trembled slightly. It helped where the temperature of the shower had not.

The South Dakota climate had changed its mind once again. In the blue-colored dusk rising from beyond the motel, the temperature was falling. Maya, her hair wet and the cold of the water still on her, shivered back to their campsite. Despite being outside rather than inside in such weather, her hair incautiously wet (Raisa, if present, would be moaning in terror), and the impending sleep on hard ground, she tried to remember the elation she had occasionally felt during the day. Alex and Max were mincing uneasily by the tent.

“It's freezing,” Maya said quickly. “Let's get inside there.”

“Max seems to think there's a rattlesnake in the tent,” Alex said.

“A what?” Maya said, stepping back. “Max, honey. What? You saw a rattlesnake?”

“Not exactly,” Alex said. “We left the tent flap unzipped when we all went to shower. He's saying—he's convinced—well, he's right here. What took you so long, Maya?”

“A snake went in there while we showered,” Max declared. He stared at the tent with—not fright, but a kind of chagrin.

Maya exchanged glances with Alex, ignoring his question. “Have you looked inside?” she said. Alex shook his head. Maya's heart was jumping, but she tried to conceal it. “We have to go to the office,” she said. “I'm sure they deal with this all the time.”

“I'm afraid,” Max said.

“But you're not afraid,” Maya said, and crouched before her son in her bathrobe. She took him by the shoulders. “Right? You're not afraid?” The boy wriggled out of her hold and encircled his father's leg with his hands.

“Alex?” Maya said.

“You want
me
to look in there?” he said.

Maya slumped onto the bench of the picnic table; they were nailed to each other. “
First-time visitors to Badlands National Park frozen in the night while rattlesnake sleeps, warm, in their
tent. The trip had been the mother's idea.”
She thought of what Raisa—better yet, the outdoorsman Eugene—would say about how quickly they had arrived at an emergency. She felt as if she had wished the rattlesnake into existence by thinking of it in the shower; in her mind, she heard Alex saying to their son, “Mama won't rest until everything's upside down.” She wrapped her robe more closely and stared, despondent, at Alex and Max.

To her the light had been clarifying, to them barbarous. The sweep of the land was menacing to them, imperial to her. The abrupt departure of the morning's cold had felt to Maya like the thaw of a steam bath in winter, to Alex and Max like a diabolical snap from freezing to burning. Even now, as a rattlesnake slithered across the floor of their tent, the indigo night settled on her with an aching crispness. It was beautiful here—epically, rinsingly beautiful. Her humpbacked hills (in the end, she preferred their modest spread even to the glorious sightings of the afternoon), squatted somewhere in the darkness, awaiting reunion with her at daylight. Maya breathed the wood smoke of campfires, the campsite's inhabitants like a caravan of pilgrims bedding down for the night. Could something felt so cleanly and deeply be felt incorrectly? She felt far not only from her husband, but son.

Alex went to call his parents; Maya went to the office. She reached a hand out for Max. He watched her warily. “You can come with, or you can wait for me here,” she said without energy. “I'll be back with Mr. Wilfred. He'll fix it.”

Max gave her his hand. Silently, they walked up to the shed. They heard the shouting inside before they walked in. Maya stood outside on the small deck with her son, wanting to give Wilfred privacy. But then she grew cold and pushed open the door; she could hear every word anyway.

He was pacing the small slot behind the reception counter. He stepped like a top-heavy animal—his shoulders shook with each step. She wanted to embrace him. He stopped striding and gazed at the mother and son from the morning. “I have to go, Carla,”
he said, his shoulders sagging. “There's customers.” A strangled squawk came through the phone. Wilfred's eyes flashed and he shouted “Up yours!” before slamming down the telephone. He withdrew it and slammed it again. He withdrew it a second time and was about to shout into the receiver once more—then remembered the line was dead. He lowered the phone weakly.

“You have every right to give this campground a low rating,” he said, and fell into his swivel chair.

“We're very happy here,” Maya said. “But there's a rattlesnake in our tent.” She tried to sound steady.

Wilfred looked up, alert. The day insisted on trying him. “You sure?” he said. “Not really the time for them anymore.”

Maya looked down at Max. “We haven't seen it,” she said. “But we think so, yes.”

“Fine,” Wilfred said. “Fine.” He dipped below the partition and popped up with a two-gauge shotgun, even this item a plaything in the logs of his fingers.

Maya moved back. “Is that necessary?” she said.

He looked at her like a surgeon second-guessed by his patient; instinctively, she rechecked his nameplate—this abrupt escalation put her in mind of police reports, and she was on probation in that department already. “I'm not gonna shoot
you
,” he said. His eyebrows, long free from the tyranny of regular grooming, moved up.

“Have you owned it long?” Maya pleaded toward Wilfred Shade's rump as she and Max bounded behind him on the weakly lit path back to the campsite; it was fully dark now. She meant the campground, but he could have answered for the shotgun. She cared about neither—she was hoping to distract him, separate out in his mind what was Carla and what was the rattlesnake. The shotgun rocked in Wilfred's hand like a baby. The crisis of five minutes before, which involved only a rattlesnake and no shotgun, seemed desirable by comparison.