Red Earth and Pouring Rain (54 page)

She looked away from me, out of the window. The only sound was the circular buzz of the tires. Overhead, two white trails
slowly disintegrated into the blue.

“Bombers,” Tom said. “Bombers from the air base at Edwards.”

“I don’t know why I tell you this,” Kyrie said, stretching lazily and lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know why.”

Amanda and I kept a silence with each other as we skimmed across the country in the Jaguar. In motel rooms, under my fingers
she opened to pleasure but in it went even further into some privateness that I could not follow into or penetrate. In spite
of all the talk in the car she told me nothing about herself, and the only thing I knew was the sometimes strange look of
inwardness that came over her when she thought nobody was watching her, a heaviness that she turned away from with a quick
shake of her shoulders. When she was driving she was beautiful: we flew across the desert under the elegant skill of her hands,
and sometimes the dust behind us, illumined by the sun, followed us like a contrail, and the car banked smoothly and turned
to the contours of the road. That she took pride in her driving I could see, and there was a joy in it, as if she had forgotten
herself, but I didn’t know enough about the skill to praise, and so I watched her instead.

We went by the towns so fast that all I saw was a general, anonymous rush of storefronts and billboards. Once I woke from
a deep sleep to see the same fragments of light in the dark, the same facades that I had seen a few hours ago. Where are we
going so fast? I said, and I saw her shoulders shrug, outlined by a rapid red light that whipped past us with a distant howl
of wind. I went back to sleep and awoke again to the same speed.

We stopped at a small town for food, on a scrubby main street surrounded by brown hills. I tried to eat at a diner, but I
felt sick and finally the only thing I could have was a McDonald’s milk shake.

* * *

I awoke startled to the sound of Gujarati, children’s voices, catch it, get the ball, here to me. For one confused moment
I thought I was back at high school in India, and felt a surge of panic: oh, God, I’m late for breakfast. Then I felt Amanda’s
leg against my own. She slept on her back, legs straight and hands folded on her stomach, never moving. I touched her shoulder
and she came awake immediately, and in the quick moment between sleep and her smile at me there was an unguarded look of fear,
a childlike glance of terror at the white ceiling and beyond. But it passed so quickly that I thought I must have imagined
it. She turned over on her side and stretched slowly.

“What’s this?” I said. High up on her left shoulder was a small smooth patch, an infinitesimal shade lighter than the surrounding
skin, so subtle that it would have been invisible but for my fingers, which felt the change in texture.

“Oh, that,” she said. “It was a birthmark. My mother had it removed when I was a kid.”

“Why?” I called to her as she went into the bathroom.

“You can’t wear off-the-shoulder gowns with a thing on your shoulder.”

“A thing? Was it ugly?”

“I don’t know. It must have been.”

“Was it red?”

When she came back in she was laughing. “I don’t know.”

She sat on the bed, and I pulled her over until I could look at her shoulder. “Must have been red,” I said.

“I don’t know. You’re so weird.”

I kissed her shoulder. Making love with Amanda was slow and tense and tight and full of unexpected fierceness, and she held
and held and relaxed only with a sob.

The children outside, boys and girls of nine and ten, were playing a game of Kings. I sat and watched them as they threw a
tennis ball at each other, dodging and shouting. Then Kyrie and Tom walked past me.

“See you in a while,” Kyrie said. “We’re going to find a haircut.”

They strolled away, and as they turned a corner Tom swung around and waved at me. I wondered what the sleeping arrangements
had been in their room, but really he didn’t seem cocky. Maybe just relaxed. But I
was too lazy to think about it, and I put my chin on my knees and drowsed, the children and their game vague gray figures
behind my eyes.

“Let’s go.” It was Amanda, buttoned up and packed and ready to move. I told her about the haircut and she turned about without
a word and went back into the room. After a while the children broke for lunch, and when I went back in she was sitting upright
on the bed watching television. I went past her into the shower, and when I came out she was still there, straight and concentrated.

“What’s the matter?”

I could’ve sworn the look on her face was hatred, but she said, merely: “I’m bored.”

“Change the channel,” I said. “They’ll be back soon.”

A group of buffalo rumbled across the screen. We watched them move from right to left in an endless stream.

“I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored.”

“So tell me a story.”

“No.”

I was annoyed by her now, and so I went outside again. I went around to the lobby, which was green all over and had bright
pictures of fruit on the wall. The owner was a small Gujarati man wearing gold-rimmed spectacles who introduced himself to
me straightaway as Desai. Desai’s equally small but plump wife came out a little while later and gave us a cup of tea, and
Desai said, “Is that your wife?” I shook my head, and he said, “Get married, young man. Get married.”

I went back to our room and Amanda was curled up on the bed. The television was blaring but I thought she was asleep. She
turned over and I saw that she was wide awake, trembling and holding herself tightly, her fists clenched between her knees.
When I lay next to her and touched her forearm the muscle twitched away and back.

“Are you still bored?” I said.

She said nothing but her eyes had the blank glaze of panic now.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Tell me a story.”

“No,” she said, and started to get up. I slapped a hand around her waist and held her back.

“No. Tell me something.”

She twisted against me and the sheer force of her quick struggle
almost had her away from me. We fought each other in a silent but completely serious tussle, and she was very strong. Finally
I had her hands twisted above her head in her T-shirt and my knees on either side of her chest. We stared at each other, panting,
and I felt my sudden, causeless anger collapse inside me. I started to get up, and she hissed, “No,” and hooked a leg over
mine, and she turned her head and bit my wrist. My hands left marks on her sides.

When we got into the car I had a comfortable kind of emptiness inside me. I was tired, and was anticipating the rush of the
freeways. Amanda started the car, and as she backed the car out of the motel parking lot she smiled at me, a small tight smile
empty of happiness. Behind us, Tom put his head on Kyrie’s lap and dozed. They had strolled in lazily in the late afternoon,
their heads shining and fragrant. Kyrie’s hair was now a deep brown, and the change from the startling white-blond of the
morning made her look younger. Tom had his hair very short, in what I thought of as a child’s haircut, spiky on top. Both
of them looked new. So we drove into the setting sun, and Amanda put on round, silver-rimmed shades that gave her a face from
another, younger decade.

“Let’s go to Texas,” I said.

“Why?” said Amanda, and I could see that putting a direction on her flight displeased her.

“I want to go to NASA,” I said. “Maybe we can see a rocket taking off.”

Kyrie leaned forward. “Maybe I’ll find my grandfather,” she said, grinning, I suppose, at the absurdity of the thought.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Want to see a rocket,” mumbled Tom.

“All right,” Amanda said. “We’ll go.”

So she wheeled us about in an enormous arc from one freeway to another, somewhere in the middle of that huge American night,
and we went south. I sat back, wide awake, and for some reason, I kept on remembering Mayo, and a boy named Shanker, older
than us, a prefect who every afternoon sat on the patio in front of his room wearing an enormous Stetson, and read avidly
and thirstily one out of his almost complete collection of Louis L’Amour, while we threw stones at a tamarind tree to knock
down clumps of the sour fruit. When we annoyed
him too much with our shouting he would look up out of his dream, eyes glazed, point a forefinger at us, and cock a thumb
back. So, Shanker, at last the real Texas.

“Real Texas?” Amanda said.

I must have mumbled it aloud, but the story was too long ago and seemed somehow too absurd to tell in that car, in that place,
and so I shrugged. “Real Texas,” I said decisively, and she cocked an eyebrow but asked no more. In real Texas I will find
you. In real Texas we will see what it is. In real Texas we will come to the heart of it.

When we actually crossed into Texas I was asleep. What woke me up was the radio buzzing about Hindu-Muslim riots in Ahmedabad,
and I fumbled with it until it clicked off. It bothered me not because of what it was about but because it seemed too messy,
it had too much of the stink of belief and the squalor of passion. I wanted the blade-edge feeling I had, the keenness of
my senses and the rush of the speed.

“We’re in Texas,” Amanda said.

We flew in a long floating curve, the road smooth and the yellow line perfect and steady under us. I leaned low over the dash
and peered ahead, straining as if I would see instantly the long white trail of a rocket far to the south. I looked at Amanda,
and I said, “Cool!” and I felt my lips pulling back from my teeth. She laughed, her hair a dark red and flying, I could see
her eyes shining, and it was something like love.

We came into Houston on a hot afternoon, and the road passed through dense, swampy land, where nothing moved. Then suddenly
the city sprang up in front of us, as abruptly as if it had nothing to do with the wetlands around it, as if it had been created
complete and whole out of a foreign imagination. The buildings ahead were huge and fantastically beautiful, so symmetrical
and straight-edged that it frightened me to look at them. It was like a city on another planet. I glanced at Amanda, and she
had a remote expression on her face, a look of concentration and resolve, like a soldier scanning a terrain for lines of fire
and dead ground.

She stopped at a motel called The Hokaido, with exposed fake-wood beams and a rock garden in the front. The floor in the rooms
was covered
with a dense brown carpet colored to look fibrous and grainy. I sat rubbing my feet over it, waiting for Amanda to emerge
from her endless shower. When she finally did come out, she was pink as a baby and as defenseless, and I held her in my lap
and kissed the top of her head, which smelled fresh and wet and of innocence. I began to hum a song, a song from some half-forgotten
black-and-white matinee, “
Too Kahan ye bata
,” and she couldn’t have known it or understood but she must have felt it in my chest, so she made small noises of contentment
and wrapped her soft white towel tightly around her; for a moment the Japanese were at bay and mad India was far away and
Amanda’s hungry velocity was ceased and Houston was gone, the only sound was falling waters, and we were quiet with each other.

That night we drifted from bar to bar, and Amanda drank vodka steadily, the only change in her being a translucent look about
the skin, so that in the humid night she had the appearance of a marble statue. The city itself was hot, huge, with a feeling
of danger that puffed up from the exhausts of the cars and the blowing of the air conditioners on the sidewalks. I tried to
imagine Amanda on the streets as a child, happy and skipping, but the picture faded away amid the clinking of the glasses
and the slow waves of conversation.

“How will you find one man in a city?” I said to Kyrie.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was a drunk. He’s probably dead long ago.

“We’ll look,” said Tom.

“What, police stations, public records?”

“No, just around here. We’ll ask.”

So they got up and started working the bar from one end to the other, leaning down to people’s ears, over the music. Every
now and then somebody would stare after Kyrie, as if they were trying to remember her, identify her among the vague memories
of childhood.

“They’re crazy,” I said. “It’s impossible.”

“Yes,” Amanda said.

I took a deep breath, and said, looking at my glass, “When are you going to call your parents?”

“My parents?”

“They’re here, right? In Houston?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to go, visit them, I mean?”

“No.”

“Amanda, they’ll know you’re here. When the credit card bill gets there, at least.”

“So?”

“So? So you’ve got to go there.”

“Why?”

“Pay your respects.”

She blinked, looking at me as if 1 was speaking a language she didn’t understand. The words felt foreign and strange even
to me, in the light from the red plastic–encased candle between us.

“You have to,” I said. “You really do.” I kept on saying this, and we gaped at each other until finally both of us burst into
laughter. But I kept on at her, while Kyrie and Tom went from bar to bar, and finally at some hour of the night so late that
it was actually cool, she broke and drawled, “All right, all right, we’ll go,” and I slept in a strange happiness, as if I
was to meet somebody I’d been looking for a long time.

We went the next morning, leaving Kyrie and Tom at the motel with Amanda’s credit card. It was a Sunday morning, and the roads
were empty and quiet. The car turned a corner, and it seemed all at once that we had left behind the malls and the condos
and the straightforward seediness of motels. Now the houses were two-storied and lawned, ivied and crenelated, the street
was suddenly smooth and was no longer a street but an oak-lined boulevard.

“Amazing,” I said. “Where are we?”

“River Oaks,” Amanda said.

“Where’s the river?” I said, but she didn’t reply. She was spinning the wheel, and in a quick turn we faced a very large building,
built on a slight rise at the center of the plot, that was unmistakably the same house I remembered from dozens of Classic
Comics set in another-century England. “Wow,” I said. “Wuthering Heights, man.”