Michael’s Wife (27 page)

At her first weekly visit to Dr. Gilcrest she told him of her experiences with the demonstrators and the police. “And two of them called me Sunny. Do you think I should try to find them and ask them about this Sunny? I could put an ad in the personal want ad column or something.”

“Why didn't you ask them at the time?”

She sighed and gave him the answer she knew he expected. “I was afraid to.”

“And now you wouldn't be afraid?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you think you might be Sunny?”

“I don't know that either. I just have to find out. And I want to do something about it, Dr. Gilcrest, not just wait.…”

“Why? Are you still afraid your husband will throw you out? Or that someone wants to kill you?”

“I don't think Michael has made up his mind. Part of him will never forgive me and part of him is still searching for the girl he left behind when he went to Vietnam. And I'm trying hard to convince myself that I'm not in any danger. If I could just remember … I'd feel easier about … everything.”

“And what will you accomplish if you do discover you are or were this Sunny?”

“Then I'd find out what I'd been doing for two years and.…”

“And what if you don't like what you've been doing? That's really what you're afraid of, isn't it? I hate to see you force this, Mrs. Devereaux. You're not ready to know of your past.…”

“But I am.”

“No. If you were, you could remember right now. This minute. There's nothing stopping you but yourself. What you really want is to learn of something, some fact which will vindicate you from the unacceptable act of deserting your child. And not just to answer your husband but because you are unable to live with this guilt yourself.”

“No!”

He leaned across the desk, smiling his deceptive benign smile, and she stiffened defiantly, knowing he always saved the best till last.

“Mrs. Devereaux, if your past were blameless you wouldn't have blocked it out.”

The man was so sensible, reasonable. She hated him.

And so when Laurel went to the desert she did it partly to prove to Dr. Gilcrest and herself that he was wrong.

21

Wind moaned through the cactus with a lonely, depressing sigh. And the desert looked as alien to Laurel now as it had those long months ago when she first remembered seeing it. Again she had that feeling of being alone and lost.

Once the Jaguar had turned off the highway she'd left the world of man and entered the world of nature where she was just one more creature in a vastness of crawling, flying, growing things. This had struck her so unexpectedly that she'd panicked and killed the engine just a few feet across the cattle guard.

A cow with watery brown eyes and stubby horns moved suddenly onto the road in front of her, watched her for a few minutes, and then for no reason jerked its head and ran off. She'd had an impression of being able to see for miles because of the flat landscape and low vegetation, but the animal disappeared completely almost at once.

She drew deep breaths, trying to regain the resolve that had brought her here against her doctor's advice, almost against her own will. The tangy smell of dried weeds prickled the inside of her nose. A car passing on the highway behind her sounded remote, as though on the other side of an impassable curtain.

There was no Harley to force her on today. It was so much easier to run away from something than back into it.…

Laurel turned the key and started down the double track, the growl of the Jaguar reassuring. She wouldn't stop this time but would follow the little road to its end if need be.

She had to make herself scan the roadsides for clues and drive slowly around the unexpected and unnecessary twists in the track. Even here the sun would pick out the shiny metallic surface of an occasional beer can.

A long drive, the tires throwing up swirls of dust behind her, the mountains drawing slowly nearer ahead. It was warm but not warm enough to explain the dampness of her body, the stickiness of her legs against the leather seat. Pain tingled up the back of her neck to her head and stayed there, growing stronger with every mile.

The road ended where the mountains began their rise off the desert floor, as she knew it would.

And there in those sagging buildings the first Paul Elliot Devereaux had met and married Paul II's mother so long ago. They did not look as if they could have helped his rise to fortune.

How could the rough stone ranch house with the caved-in porch have been large enough for Harley's family later? A scruffy big-boned dog barked from the hole that had been a doorway. The squawking chicken jumped to the ground from a glassless window frame. Part of the roof had disappeared, exposing bare rafters. A head with a bright red bandanna peeked around the door of a teetering outhouse on the other side of the rusty pump that sat on a concrete platform. A limp artificial flower hung upside down from the pump handle. Wind creaked the ancient useless windmill to face another direction and blew the smell of the outhouse to her as she sat in the open car.

Two corrals with gateless fences faced the house across the farmyard and a silver metal shed that didn't look as if it belonged. The dog stopped its barking and came down off the porch toward her. A child cried in one of the tents set up next to the weathered picket fence.

Laurel ignored the dog and the people coming out of the tents as she stepped from the car and walked hesitatingly toward the picket fence. Assorted clothes were thrown over it to dry. The fence enclosed a small rectangle of desert separated from the house only by a well-tended vegetable garden.

That small rectangle was a graveyard. The graves were old but the white wooden crosses at their heads were new.

Those graves didn't surprise her, nor the crosses. But something was wrong. Laurel put her hand on a slivered board of the fence, the windmill creaking and grating above her, and counted. There was one too many. There should have been five but there were six mounds in the enclosure, the one on the end newer than the others in the row.

“Sunny?” The young black stood at her side, a floppy hat over his bush of hair.

“There should be five graves.”

“You come to see Sid?”

“Sid?”

“Come on.” He took her arm and guided her back around the Jaguar toward the corrals. She couldn't look into the faces around her. Quite a few people had gathered in the yard while she stood at the picket fence.

“I thought you were in jail,” she said.

“I had bail. They let a lot go anyway 'cause they ran out of jail.”

Four or five old cars, a bus, and a motorcycle sat in the sun behind the corral, facing its open side. Two men squatted Indian-style on the dirt floor of the corral and smoked. At first she could see just their shapes in the relative darkness.

“Sid? Look who's out slumming and in a red Jag yet,” her companion said as he released her elbow. He turned to leave and motioned one of the others to come with him. The one who remained raised a hand as if in blessing and said, “God be with you” to them as they left. This elicited a deep guffaw from the black.

“Have a chair.” Sid motioned to the dirt around him. He wore cowboy boots and Levi's and no shirt. His ribs and the bones of his shoulders protruded from under his skin, accentuating his long thinness. Bristly puffs of hair in his armpits matched the black of his untrimmed beard. He studied her from behind oversized wire-rimmed glasses. Sid was the John the Baptist she'd seen on TV … and something more.…

“Well,” he said, stubbing out the cigarette in the dirt. And then he repeated it, “Well,” and sat silently waiting for her to speak.

Laurel wished she hadn't come, made marks in the dirt with her fingernail, wondered where to begin. “You know me?”

“'Bout as well as I know anybody. What do you want, Sunny?”

“One day last April I found myself down by the highway. I didn't know why. Had I been here?”

“Yes.”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me … about everything? How you met me? What I was doing here?”

“Why?”

“Because I don't remember.”

“Sunny, Sunny. Hey, don't cry. It's all right.” He reached out a hand to cover hers. “It's all right.” But there was something sad in the way he said it.

“Well, tell me please. Even if you don't believe I don't know.” She took her hand away and searched in her purse for a Kleenex.

“If you say so, I believe it.” He unfolded his long legs and took a rolled-up sleeping bag from a corner, spreading it out for her to sit on. “You'll get your pretty dress all dirty.” Then he walked out to one of the cars parked in the sun and came back with two cans of very warm beer.

Next he did a strange thing; he lay out on the sleeping bag and put his head on her lap. And then he began talking as if he often found himself in weird situations, had grown to expect it. “A couple of years ago, I was passing through Denver and saw some kids demonstrating in front of the capitol building. Can't remember why, but I thought I'd help them out so I grabbed a sign nobody was using and joined them.” He had a compelling voice, rich yet soft. “We ended up in a park and there you were, looking all sweet and sad. And you said ‘Help me.' You looked like a good thing, so I said, ‘Okay.'”

There was a shy sadness in his smile and in the eyes behind the orange-tinted glasses that reminded her of Paul Devereaux, as if Sid too shared that sad secret of life.… Ridiculous—Paul and Sid were so different, poles apart. He made gentle fun of both of them as he continued the story, holding the beer can on his chest. Once he lifted a dirty finger to touch her cheek.

Occasionally someone would come around the end of the corral and smile and then leave without disturbing them. Flies droned across the streaks of dusty sunlight filtering through the holes in the roof.

His head lay heavy on her legs, but she didn't want to shift her weight and break his line of thought. Laurel had left reality behind when she turned off the highway, and she'd never felt further from it than now, sitting in the lazy warmness, drinking tepid beer and looking down at the strange hair-shrouded face on her lap.

He'd taken her with him to Boulder, a town thirty miles north of Denver, and then west into the mountains where a sort of communal colony of young people had been set up for the summer. (Laurel thought again how strange it was that in a way she'd told the truth at the hearing.) Whenever anyone had asked her name or where she came from she would tell them she didn't know. So they named her Sunny for her smile and accepted her without question.

“It was a kind of slow, soft warm smile that cheers people up, like when the sun comes out after a week of rain,” Sid said.

When winter came to the mountains of Colorado, they left for San Francisco and then returned the following summer. He talked of wading in cold rocky streams and walking through thick pine forest and picking wildflowers for her hair. He described an idyllic existence where big children romped in the sun, unharried by responsibility, like the Garden of Eden before the apple.

Sid skimmed over the winter in San Francisco. They hadn't liked it—too crowded—too many tourists gawking at them. So the second winter they'd moved to Southern California. But again they weren't satisfied, so in March they had come to Arizona. In April he'd gone on a pot run to Nogales and when he returned she was gone.

“And that's it, little Sunny.” He pulled her head down over his and kissed her gently. He smelled of beer and sweat. “So now where to?” And then he stood and moved to a window hole that faced the farmyard.

Laurel felt too weak to stand. The forgotten headache returned. “Why did I leave?”

“Who knows? You weren't too happy about my John the Baptist thing. We looked around for you, thought you might have gotten lost on the desert. When I couldn't find you, I figured you'd decided to move on.”

“Why
do
you do this John the Baptist thing?”

“To stir up the sleeping flowers before they get trampled by Army boots.”

“That Negro who came in with me.…”

“Who, Rollo? Oh, he's all right, but his propaganda is geared to the peasant mentality. We're not too long on peasants. His stuff turns people off. You never liked him.” Sid sat beside her and began rolling a cigarette. He offered it to her, and when she refused, he shrugged and lit it.

“Did I take drugs?”

“No. You smoked some, but I can't remember you being interested in the other stuff.”

“Those graves out there … that last one is new.…”

“That was bad. We didn't know what else to do. It's better for you, you don't know about that, Sunny.”

“Sid, I have to know everything or I'll go crazy. I did remember that graveyard … it kept coming back to haunt me. But I remembered five graves.”

“Yeah.…” He finally let go of the smoke. “… Okay. We found a dead guy just a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how long he'd been out there. The animals'd been at him … and the birds. So … we buried him … it seemed like the right thing to do …”

“You didn't report it to the police?”

“We can't have the police out here, you know that. They're just waiting to get something on us. People come and go around here all the time without saying anything. We wouldn't know if anyone was missing.”

“Sid.…” Laurel looked away and made designs on the dirt with her finger. “Did we … get married? Or anything?”

“We didn't get married.” He gave a strange high-pitched giggle. “But … mmmmm, baby … that or anything!”

She knew what his answer would be. She'd known it when she entered the corral, but it took some time to digest it. Laurel covered her face with her hands. Maybe Dr. Gilcrest was right, maybe she wasn't ready.