Road to Paradise (36 page)

“Well, that’s right,” said Emma. “You think the universe began with your birth.” She changed the subject. “Tell me you’re all right. Or I’m going to worry.”

“I’m fine. Honest.” I swallowed so my voice wouldn’t break. I couldn’t explain to her on the phone what was happening to me, not when it was costing her $3 a minute to talk. “Is everything okay at home?”

“It’s swell,” she said. “The Lambiels have moved out. They’re getting a divorce. We got new tenants now. You’d like them, they have two sons your age.”

“Two?” I almost laughed. “Yes, but are they French?”

“
Mais naturellement, mademoiselle
!”

“Oh, Emma …”

“All right, all right, this is costing me a fortune,” she said. “Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I promise. You know me. You know I will.”

“You haven’t picked up any hitchhikers, have you?”

“I really gotta go, Emma, don’t worry about anything, bye!”

After I hung up, I don’t know if she felt any better for my having called, but I was pretty sure I didn’t. I wished again I’d sent her a postcard from Valentine.
Someone’s thinking of you here,
in the heart of the Sand Hills
.

I turned to go—and gasped startled. A homeless Indian man was standing nearly flush with me. “Hello, darling,” he said. He was a few years older than me, with long slick hair tied in a pony tail; his ripped layers of odd clothes smelled; he was very dark, round-faced, smiling. “My name is Surio. Hope you having a nice day. Do you have thirteen cents I can borrow?”

“What?” I wiggled my way past him and onto the street.

“Yeah, that’s all I need. My friend over there, do you see him? He’s sitting by the wall, he’s not feeling too good. Just thirteen cents will be enough for us. Have you got that?”

He was wheedly, and polite. Why did he scare me almost worse than Erv? Because his menace was so contained.

“I don’t have thirteen cents.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, his manner less polite. “You’re walking around here in your expensive sandals and your expensive jewels. You don’t have thirteen cents for me and my sick buddy over there? Just come with me for a minute, come talk to my friend.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said, my voice starting to shake. My gaze darted around the street. “My sandals are Dr. Scholl’s, and my beads are from Genovese Drugs.” There was no
one on the street! It was a Sunday afternoon, Main Street, and there was no one except me and him. I turned out my pockets. “Look,” I said, “I’m out here just taking a walk. I brought nothing with me.”

“Except your suitcase.”

“Uh—”

“Your suitcase and everything in it. Including possibly thirteen cents?”

“Nothing but clothes,” I said, cursing my suitcase. “No money, no change, no cash. I wanted to stop by the bank, but it’s Sunday. I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Now can you leave me alone?”

A car passed. He backed away one step.

“Hey!” someone called from behind me. I turned my head. It was Candy, running across the street. Quickly she came up and put her hand on my shoulder. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Who is this?”

Surio looked Candy up and down with great interest. “He wants thirteen cents,” I explained.

“Hang on a sec,” said Surio, his attention firmly fixed on Candy. “There are ten trucks a day who come by looking for a girl like you, a young girl with pink streaks in her hair, riding shotgun in a yellow bird, the kind that’s parked in the alley my pal and I live in. Strange to park a car like that in an alley, not on the street, almost as if hidin’ it, but whatever. Ten truckers a day blowin’ by here for weeks, askin’ ’bout a yellow rollerskate and three pretty seat covers. Go figure.” He smiled. “Until today, my answer’s always been I’ve seen nothin’.”

“Give him the thirteen cents,” Candy said to me, “and let’s go.”

“I don’t have any change!”

“Tsk. Tsk. Might need more than thirteen cents, now, sweetheart,” Surio said pleasantly.

Candy and I exchanged a look. She shook her head. “How much do you think you might need now, cowboy?”

“Dunno. Reward for finding the car
or
the girl is a hundred dollars.”

Candy whistled. “A hundred dollars, huh.”

“Somebody must want you pretty bad if they’re willing to pay a hundred.” He stared lewdly at her even though she was wearing church clothes.

“Let’s go,” Candy said, pulling on me, and after waving to Surio, she called out, “Tell them we’re headed to Denver, pal. Don’t forget now!”

“A little scratch for me and I’ll keep my trap shut.”

“Why would
we
pay you? We’re not looking for the car or the girl.”

And in the Mustang, Candy said, “Thirteen cents, a hundred bucks, five thousand, it won’t matter. The next trucker through here will know all about us for a bag of weed.”

And I thought that if we didn’t know all about us, how could they?

Gina wanted to go to Deadwood. While she was waiting for me, she talked to the doorman at Alex Johnson who told her there was gambling there. “Gina,” said Candy. “There’s gambling in Reno, too.”

Except that Deadwood was forty miles away, Gina unhappily pointed out, and Reno was 1200. “Half an hour’s drive,” Gina said. “Come on, girls, how often do I ask?”

“Every time you think there’s gambling somewhere,” retorted Candy. “Sorry, Gina, the Lord said, no gambling on His day.”

“How long is it going to take us to get to flippin’ Reno?”

“The way we’ve been driving, a month,” I said. No one laughed, and though I think I was kidding, I couldn’t be sure.

Needless to say, we didn’t go to Deadwood. We headed south, winding and loopy, for the Black Hills.

“The car is trouble, Shel,” said Candy. “Real trouble.”

“The car,” said Gina pointedly, “is not the real trouble, Candy Cane.”

Candy ignored her. “As long as we have it,” she continued, “we’re going to have problems.”

“You talking about the car?” Gina said. “Uh, okay.”

“Well, then, we’re going to have problems for a long time,” I told Candy, “because Emma gave me this car. Why don’t you cut
your hair, girlfriend, or paint it black, get rid of the pink, wear a hat, start with that, then worry about my car?”

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s find a drugstore. We’ll buy some Clairol peroxide.”

But there were no drugstores in the woods. The one strip mall we passed was closed on Sunday. “You see?” Candy said to Gina. “Sunday is a day off for everybody.”

“Can it be a day off from you?” snapped Gina, back in her funk. “I didn’t think so. Funny how that works. No respite there.”

On the weaving roads in the pines we drove, the evergreen foliage so thick and dark green that it looked black. Hence the name—Black Hills. During gray days or winters, it must be frightening to drive up and down these roads through the tall and brooding pines.

It felt like August, and someone, maybe Gina, said it’s the dog days, because it was very hot and felt like that. We opened the windows for some air and the breeze whipped through the car, and on the radio, for the rest of your life played Ricky, don’t lose that number. Candy tried to sing along to the chorus, but got it all broken and wrong. Why did Candy’s not knowing any regular songs suddenly make me pity her so exquisitely? What are you going to teach your baby if you don’t know any songs? I wanted to ask. Where are you going to run, so you can fit in, where people aren’t going to look at you and say, what do you mean you don’t know “Hush Little Baby?”

But she knew the Psalms. One through one hundred and fifty.

“Candy, any Psalms appropriate for little babies?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Psalm 123 isn’t bad.
Onto thee I lift up
mine eyes, as the eyes of the servants onto the eyes of their masters
…
have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us
.”

“Yes, lovely,” said Gina. “So much better than ‘This Old Man.’”

Through the Black Hills, past Mount Rushmore, across fake Western towns full of tourists, we rode. Down to the river.

Should we stop at Mount Rushmore? we asked each other, and feeling pressed for time, crushed down by all manner of things,
decided not to; not even decided, just kept driving. Next time, we said, full of optimistic youth, one hundred percent certain there’d be a next time.

Maybe 99.9 percent certain.

“You know, if I lived here,” said Candy, “you could come and visit me.”

“Yeah, you’d be like Laura Ingalls,” said Gina. “She lived here.”

“Who?”

“God! Never mind.”

“Live where? Mount Rushmore?” I asked. But Candy surprised me.

“Well, no,” she replied uncertainly. “Not Mount Rushmore. But around here. One of these western towns, in the woods, hidden away. Tara and I could settle here, and I’d find me a job, a little apartment. She’d go to school. I’d work. And when you were off from college, you could come visit us.”

I said nothing. Gina said nothing. Then I said, “What kind of job?”

Candy said nothing.

Then she said, “Making caskets?”

Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” played on the radio, and there was no way he could hold his head without it hurting. “Stormy Monday,” when Etta James got down on her knees and prayed. “Gloomy Sunday,” when Marianne Faithfull was slumberless.

“Boy, the DJ must have had a fight with his wife this morning,” said Gina.

Soon we were out of South Dakota heading down a steep decline recently blackened by a severe and expansive wildfire, the ground singed for a swathe thirty miles long and wide all the way to the horizon, down to the flats of Wyoming.

“Wyoming has spectacular mountains,” Gina said.

I forced myself to say an ironic “Oh yeah?”

“Yes. Some of the most dramatic, most beautiful mountain ranges in the U.S. are in Wyoming. The Tetons. The Wind River
Mountains. The Bighorn. The Laramie Range. It’s the Rockies, you know, and they reach up grand into this state.”

“Should we avoid the mountains?” asked Candy. “I worry we’ll get lost.”

“Nah. Shelby over there is like Henry Stanley.”

“Who?” Candy turned her head to the window.

“I think the Great Divide is in Wyoming,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that.”

We were just trying to make conversation, attempting to avoid our most pressing concerns.

Candy asked what the Great Divide was. I told her it was a split in the Continental shelf that made the rivers flow east to west instead of west to east. The Great Divide, I explained, changes the orientation of the things around you.

Candy was thoughtful. “And you can see this?”

“Absolutely. We’re going to drive right through it. Map clearly says so.”

“The Great Divide, huh? Wonder if there are any songs written about it.”

We couldn’t think of any. This occupied us. “Maybe Willie Nelson?”

Gina, though, couldn’t avoid all topics for long. “Candy, is Floyd an example of your story?” she asked. “The Judas story?” We couldn’t get our minds off his breathtaking disloyalty.

Candy sighed, looked thoughtful. I tried to sneak a peek at her in the rearview. “I don’t want him to be,” she finally said. “I’d hate to think this was just the beginning of my sorrows. I’ve already had so many. I was kind of hoping it was the end.”

I think it’s going to rain today. I think it’s gonna rain today. Neil Diamond thought so.

She was quiet through Custer, a spooky place with wooden log cabins and log cabin bars nestled in the pines.

“Maybe here?” she asked.

“Here what?”

“Maybe I could live here with my baby.”

“What would you do?”

“Dunno. Make caskets?”

“You know, Sloane,” Gina said, “Candy may have a point. There’s a call for certain professions everywhere. Don’t you agree? I mean, for instance, every town needs a casket maker.”

“Exactly!” said Candy, brightening.

I pushed Gina, silently exhorting her to stop.

What would Candy do anywhere? Wasn’t that the eternal question. If we could have
that
figured out, I felt we could have many things figured out. Perhaps we were trying to figure out too much. We had only the day in front of us, and we were trying to imagine what we would do with our whole lives, what Candy would do. I felt as if any minute someone would yell at us: “Take human bites!”

“Could
you
live here?” Candy asked me.

I didn’t think so.

“Could
you
?” she asked Gina.

“If I was with Eddie, yes.”

Candy groaned. “Honestly, Gina, maybe we need to look past Eddie. To the rest of your life.”

“But Eddie is the rest of my life.”

“Okay.” Candy sounded tired.

“What’s the matter with you?” Some of the neutral feeling had gone from the car. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

Between the seats, Candy turned to look at Gina. “I got plenty of time to fall in love,” she said. “I gotta fix my life first in the here and now. Gotta get myself together, get my baby sorted out. There’ll be time enough for love.”

There were no towns or mountains around us, just Wyoming, the silvery sagebrush sea, and flat grazing land.

“Didn’t you love Mike?” asked Gina.

Candy tightened her mouth. She didn’t reply for a little while. I say a little while, but we moved two longitude points on the map. Where were we going? No one knew. If there were only two roads, neither of which we could take, how were we going to get from point A to point B? We had said we would stop at the next
town. And here we were, looking for the next town, and that’s when Candy said, “I once thought I loved him. He was my first proper boyfriend. I’ve never really had another.”

“He’s the father of your child.”

“Yes.” But she said it in the tone of someone who was saying, “No.” Or “The time is 2:17,” which it was. Where in heaven’s name were we? And where were these fabled mountains? Nebraska was the Himalayas compared to these parts. The country, almost parodying life, or perhaps, life parodying the country, was constantly surprising me. I stared off at the muggy, blurred-by-the-sun line of the horizon.

The trees had been left far behind, in South Dakota. The hills, too. There was nothing here in Wyoming, except us, the road and the sagebrush. The only signs of civilization were the fences that ran along the miles of highway to keep the grazing animals from wandering out and getting killed. I wondered if it was to protect us or the animals. We didn’t see any grazing. Neither did we see men, women, children, buffalo. There was no gas station, nowhere to get a Coke, no motels. There was no wildlife, no deer, rabbits, or birds.

“You want to live here?” I asked Candy.

“I dunno,” she replied dully. “I have to live somewhere. Now that I’ve lost my money, I have to find a place where Erv can’t find me.”

“This ain’t it,” said Gina. “Here you might as well put an orange hat on your head, and signal him. Yo, Erv, I’m the only resident of Wyoming.”

“What about Custer? We passed that a few miles back.”

“It made even you depressed,” said Gina. “I saw your face.”

“It’s not Custer that made me depressed,” said Candy.

Suppressing a sigh, a sound of anguish, I said to Gina, “Show me a grazing animal.”

“Perhaps they’re all dead,” Gina said wisely. “Maybe their ecosystem is already ruined. That’s why compassionate people are fighting to save it.”

Candy chuckled. “Look left, girls.” As we passed a small beat-
down farm, near the barbed wire fence lay two llamas, lazing not grazing.

“Llamas, Gina,” I said, slowing down to take a better look. “Llamas in Wyoming. Interesting. Are they, hmm, indigenous to the sagebrush?”

Gina rolled her eyes. “Make fun. Go ahead. But when you can’t get a decent burger in your cute little Cambridge, Massachusetts, you’ll know why.”

The grassland was like the Sand Hills in Nebraska. Infinite. After Custer and Newcastle there had been no towns. We’d gone a hundred miles.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we stopping?”

“I don’t know. I’d like to find a place to live, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Here?” I threw out my arm to indicate the landscape, empty except for the interminable grassland, separated from the road by miles of chicken-wire fence. Candy laughed a little, then retreated once more to her window.

Forty miles further on, just as I was worrying about running out of gas, out of nowhere, small suburban tract houses rose from the ground, clustered together in a housing development. We stopped, rolled down our windows. Some kids were skateboarding while their dad washed the car. “Excuse me,” Gina said, “can you kids tell me what this place is called?”

One of the kids pointed at the sidewalk. “This is Wright,” he said. “Who you looking for?”

“Gas,” Gina said, glancing back at Candy. Slowly we drove through the development that was the town of Wright. The fascinating thing was that a quarter mile earlier there had been nothing, and now there were houses, but not a single business, no stores, supermarkets, or restaurants, no shops of any kind. Just private, close-together
homes with small yards. A minute later, we were out of the housing development, and the sign on the road said, “Thank you for visiting Wright, Wyoming, a good place to live and work.”

“Can I live here?” asked Candy, looking around.

“Why not?” I said. “Llamas do.”

Up ahead on the main road, we saw a gas station and a Subway deli in a separate building nearby. I pumped gas while the girls got out to stretch their legs, then we drove the five yards uphill to get a sandwich. The place looked closed, but only because there was almost no one in it. The only food game in town; yet there was just one customer inside, a burly tall man who looked like a truck driver. We saw him through the window, and even here in the middle of staggering nowhere, got a pang in our gut, and rolled around back, staying in the car until he left. The three of us said nothing as we waited for him to empty out.

The girl behind the counter was slicing cheese, the boy wiping the shredded lettuce onto the floor. We ordered, and while the girl was making our tuna and salami and roast beef, Candy asked, “Excuse me, but what do all the men do in this town?”