Healing Sands (23 page)

Not that I wouldn't enjoy getting J.P.'s hackles up, but that would break Poco out in hives, and I couldn't do that to her. I'd felt smaller and meaner and dirtier as the last two days had gone on, and I needed to see myself as something besides a lying, calculating woman who had failed at motherhood and left her husband to be preyed on by a psychiatric case in stilettos.

“All right,” Frances said. “Talk to me.”

I blinked at her.

“About your story, Ryan.”

Make that a lying, calculating failure with an attention deficit disorder.

I shook myself back to the array on the screen. “I'm just getting started. I was only up there yesterday, and then again today.”

“Let's see.” Light flickered on her pale face as she clicked each one into view.

“This man has hepatitis A from the total lack of sanitation,” I said, “but if he doesn't go to work, he misses a payment on his land and the lender will seize the property and the fifteen years of payments will be totally nullified—that's the scam they all fell for. This is the cemetery—it's hard to tell which looks more dead, that or the streets where people are still alive.”

“As I said before, you're going to need audio to sell this. Do you have any for me to listen to?”

I shook my head, probably too sharply. “I got some, but I haven't edited it yet.”

“I'd like to hear the raw material,” Frances said. “That's what these meetings are for. Not that you don't know what you're doing. You're a lot more experienced than—”

“It isn't that. I just need to get more, that's all.”

Frances frowned as she pulled up the whole array again. “You're going to have to start with some audio to set the tone before the pictures come up so the readers are a little bit in the dark about what they're about to see. We don't want them thinking this is just going to be another bleeding-heart liberal put-down of all of us who have the gall to live above the poverty line.” She looked at me, eyes popping in the near darkness. “It isn't, is it?”

“No!”

“Then what are you going for, exactly?”

“The truth,” I said.

She nodded without seeming to agree with me and turned back to the screen. “Of course, the quality is excellent, no problems there—oh, wait.”

“What?” I sounded testy, and I didn't care.

“I love this.”

She was looking at Elena Sanchez, face pressed to the car window.

“Now, I can see something in
her
,
”
Frances said. “It goes deeper than just ‘I'm poor and I want somebody to pay my bills.' What's her story, do you know?”

My mouth went dry. “I've only just started talking to her.”

“Well, talk to her some more. I think this is what you need, right here.” She pushed back from the desk with her palms and sat straight-armed. “Right now you're only at about second base with this story. She can get you a home run. Otherwise I think you might strike out.” Frances gave herself a wry look. “I'll be glad when the play-offs are over. I'm starting to talk like a sports commentator.”

She dismissed me by turning back to the police scanner. “Have a nice weekend,” she said. “I can't believe I'm letting you out of shooting the Whole Enchilada Festival.”

I gave Elena Sanchez one more long look before I turned off my laptop.

By the time we reached the White Sands National Monument, I was over J.P. Winslow. Done. Ready to turn around and head back to Las Cruces barefoot, with all four of our packs on my back.

All the way there, while she was driving, she went through a memorized checklist of everything we were supposed to have brought. She chewed Victoria out for spacing out on the matches, and proclaimed what a good thing it was that she herself had brought extras. That went for the hand sanitizer Poco had left behind and the trash bags I didn't even know I was supposed to have packed.

I wondered silently why she'd even bothered to give assignments if she was going to bring everything anyway. I only kept that to myself because Poco was looking a little like, as my mother would have said, a sheep-killin' dog. Once she was royally reamed for the hand sanitizer faux pas, she stopped trying to make happy conversation. That left J.P. to carry on for the remaining twenty minutes of the ride with a tirade about Cade's teacher.

So, yes, upon arrival, I would cheerfully have hiked over San Augustin Pass and traversed the Organ Mountains with the coyotes to get away from J.P. Winslow. The only thing that held me back was the challenge in her eyes when I caught her looking at me. There were too many other tests in my life just then that I couldn't seem to pass. Hers I could ace with both hands tied behind my back. And I had to, for the sake of my eroding self-esteem.

J.P. left the engine on in the Suburban as she opened the door in the parking lot.

“I'll go in and sign us up for the sunset tour,” she said. “There's no point in all of us going in.”

I opened my door and climbed out. “I'm going to have a look around.”

“Don't go far. I'm only going to be about five minutes.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said.

I wasn't all that interested in the assortment of bizarre cacti planted in front of the building, but I wandered among them anyway. The plaques informed me that once I got into the dunes themselves, I would see little vegetation, because they moved too fast for plants to grow.

The dunes moved? In spite of myself I found that sort of intriguing. An image came to mind of ghostly mounds of sand marching across the desert—but to what destination? And why? That was the part that nettled me, I realized. The sense of drift, the lack of purpose. It occurred to me that Dan must love it out here.

I smacked myself internally and forced my focus onto the next sign. My eyes immediately glazed over the whole business about the crystallized form of gypsum from the evaporation of Lake Lucero that broke down into grains of sand and was blown across the Tularosa Basin, where it piled into dunes.

“That people pay to walk around on it,” I muttered, “and then buy a T-shirt that says they've been there.”

“We need to get going.”

I looked up at J.P., who was standing on the gravel walkway, tapping a brochure against her leg.

“Poco and Victoria went in to use the restroom,” she said. Her pointed look indicated that I might want to do the same.

“I'm good,” I said.

“There aren't any toilets out there.”

“I'm
fine
.”

“Then you probably aren't drinking enough water. I'm not interested in carrying you out if you get dehydrated, and it can happen like that out there.” She snapped her fingers.

Poco and Victoria joined us in the car, and we passed through the gate, where J.P. collected a buck fifty from each of us to cover the entrance fee. As we continued down the paved but sand-dusted road and passed the last of the yuccas and the creosotes and the bear grass, I had the suffocating sense of being at a point of no return. Especially when the only living thing left to see was the occasional burst of orange at the top of a stark-white dune.

“I thought nothing could grow out here,” I said, as much to make sure I still existed as to get information.

“That's the top of a Rio Grande cottonwood tree,” Victoria said.

I turned to stare at her. She sounded like an excited little girl.

“No way,” I said.

“Oh yes. It's been buried by the dune over time, but it can survive as long as some leaves are exposed.” She almost pressed her nose to the glass. “Isn't it stunning? Oh, and see, that's the tip of a yucca. You only see about two feet of it, but there could be thirty feet under the sand.”

Obviously mistaking my disbelief for burgeoning interest in desert foliage, she got up on one knee and pointed. “You see that pedestal of sand there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That's the trunk of a tree that has held on to the gypsum when the dune moved on. That's good, because it provides food and shelter for the animals.”

“Animals?” I said. “What could live in this?”

“Little kangaroo rats and Apache pocket mice. I've even seen a kit fox and a couple of weasels. Only one snake.”

I watched, amused, as Victoria clapped her hands.

“They're all nocturnal, so we may see some tonight.”

“Hopefully not the snake.” Poco's nervous giggle was back.

“But the best, the
best
, is the bleached lizard. It totally matches the sand. We might see one, or we might just see its footprints in the morning. I like that even better—it's like seeing that fairies have been here.”

Victoria hugged her knees happily to her chest. I found myself envious of the filter she was seeing through. To me this was a wasteland where small animals had to forage through the night to survive. Had I always been like this?

“There's our guide,” J.P. said as she pulled into a small parking lot connected to the dune field by a low wooden boardwalk.

“Who needs a guide when we have Victoria?” Poco said.

J.P. grunted. “You don't want to get lost out there, trust me.”

“Is that the voice of experience?” I said—with a sort of evil hope in my voice.

She glared at me in the rearview mirror. “You're kidding, right?” “J.P. doesn't
get
lost,” Poco said.

So we'd returned to our roles. I reeled in my next barb and busied myself getting the camera ready. Frances had said it was easier to make pictures in the evening here.

Camera on its strap around my neck, I followed the trio down the walk and got ready for another commentary on gypsum and alkali flats and buried trees. But our guide was remarkably quiet as we followed him down the boardwalk, which, I saw, extended far from the road and into the dunes.

“See the lizard tracks?” Victoria whispered to me.

I looked where she was pointing. Tiny feet had left their imprint on ripples in the sand that must have looked like foothills to their owners. As we walked, the miniature footprints disappeared under a soft blowing of sand that began to take on a reddish-pink hue as the daylight faded. The shadows lengthened, and the surface patterns pronounced themselves more clearly.

Frances was right. While in the stark sunlight, the white dunes came out gray if I didn't overexpose the photo by one or two stops, but now I could use the internal meter and capture their true colors—apricot and salmon and the skin of a peach.

I stopped and shot a slice of dunes and the silhouette of a yucca's tassels against a suddenly fiery sky. Camera raised, I shot the sun dipping below the distant San Andres Mountains. When it finally disappeared, I could almost hear it hiss in the stillness that fell with it, leaving the desert bathed in a light full of mystery as the sands glowed against the dark horizon. This I couldn't photograph.

“Ryan,” Poco whispered. “Turn around.”

I did, and gasped. As the sun had made its flashy descent in the west, the moon had risen silently and without fanfare in the east. Round and full as a ripe, silver fruit, it hung in the darkened sky. A whole minute passed before I could raise the camera again. It almost seemed a sacrilege to make a picture.

But once I got started, I couldn't stop. I took shot after shot, experimenting with a filter, focusing on the silhouettes of the women with the moon as their backlight, capturing the lone star that winked shyly near the lunar splendor. I might have stayed half the night if Poco hadn't tugged gently at my sleeve.

“We're leaving,” she whispered.

“Okay,” I whispered back.

Everyone spoke in hushed tones. The stillness demanded it. There was not a sound beyond the muted padding of our feet on the boards. Nothing arose to stop the thoughts or steer them away from themselves. J.P. was at least right about that. It was easy to get lost in them.

I found it terrifying.

By the time we reached the car, my palms were so sweaty I could barely hold the camera. I was actually grateful when J.P. unlocked the car and set off the alarm that made the horn blast repeatedly, splintering the silence. I was so grateful, in fact, that I didn't even gloat when other parties shot killing looks at her until she managed to turn it off.

“That definitely ruined the moment, didn't it?” she said.

I stared at the back of her head. Was that self-deprecation I heard?

“Okay, onward,” she said. “We go around two curves and there's the entrance to the walk into the campsite.” She turned to back the car up and looked sternly at Victoria and me. “You did bring your flashlights, didn't you?”

“The moonlight should be enough,” I said.

“You did forget.”

“Didn't you bring extras?” I said sweetly.

She scowled.

“Just checking,” I said. “I brought mine.”

When we got to the check-in point, two guys with everything they owned in fanny packs were just finishing up at the registration book. They threw laughing glances over their shoulders as they hurried off down the path. I guess I'd have laughed, too, if I'd run into four suburban housewives loaded up like beasts of burden. I'd seen pack mules in Bolivia with less stuff on their backs than we had.

“You are not serious,” J.P. said at the sign-in book.

Poco edged over to her. “What's wrong?”

“They took the last campsite!”

“Didn't you make a reservation?” I said.

“I told you, they don't take reservations. But nobody ever camps out here at this time of year.”

Victoria blinked at the path. “
They
do.”

“Yes, those guys and four other parties. Probably all together for some kind of beer fest.”

Her efforts at blaming somebody else for what was no one's fault were failing her. I watched her shoulders slump.

“I'm sorry, guys,” she said.

“You couldn't have known,” Poco said.