Travelling Light (11 page)

“Maybe down in Mexico,” said Thomas.

Thomas paid for the boots using Jimmy Joe's MasterCard and they left the store carrying the high-tops in a paper sack.

They got into the car, but before leaving Marfa they had to wait out a freight train screeching and thundering through the centre of town.

“Damn you, Thomas. You never say anything, but I know what you're thinking.”

Once the train had passed they could see the yellow sprawl of grassland, nearly desert. In the distance a rim of blue mountains.

“That there,” Thomas said, “is Mexico.”

“You know I'm going to die down there, someplace real lonely where you don't have to get involved in anything but can just bury me off the side of the road. Isn't that what'll happen? Isn't that how you have it figured?”

“If it's what you want,” said Thomas. “You could have died in Brooklyn. The desert is a clean place. And the air is cool, mornings and evenings. Smells nice. That's the way I remember it.”

“You know what I'm thinking, boyo?”

“What?” Thomas stuck a cigarette between Jimmy Joe's lips and lit it for him.

“I'm thinking about the calf.”

“I was too.”

“I buried it in a pit and piled rocks on so the farm dogs couldn't get at it, drag it out under moonlight, howling. Will you do that much for me?”

“Don't even think of it,” Thomas said.

NIGHT
DRIVING

I like driving at night. I like everything about it. It's the best.

I was a little girl, Daddy would say, Hop right up here, Face. And I'd skitter across the front seat and squeeze up into his lap. He'd settle back a little into the seat, give me room behind the wheel, and there I'd be. What cars we had! My favourite was the last, a '59 Catalina, Wyoming plates. Big wide white with tail fins. We had the back seat ripped out of her and cut open into the trunk. Daddy fixes her up with plywood and a mattress, and there we both sleep. Plenty of room. With little curtains hung on a string round all the windows so what we do is private. Daddy likes it that way.

We are asleep in California six weeks past when
wham! bam!
on the doors, and deputies are there all of a sudden, like out of your dreams, and arrest Daddy and haul him off to jail. I am in jail too, alone and so lonesome, but they don't hold me for long; they turn me loose, which is worse until I meet Johnboy at the church. He now takes care of me and I take care of him and he tells me, Forget Daddy, put that right out of your mind. But I can't. He says, You are a pore little orphan Vetnamee girl. Pretty little slant-eyes. They send him back to Folsom, Johnboy say, for years. My Daddy.

What I liked best was driving at night, me and Daddy both behind the wheel. On the great black roads out there, somewhere empty, Nebraska, Canada.

This past weekend, finally, month and a half after they take Daddy and stick him in jail, me and Johnboy finally get out on the road together. We go up to Tahoe in his van. We're getting married.

Johnboy says, Ah, little Vetnamee girl, I love your tiny feet! 'Cause I like to ride at night with my shoes off and my feet resting up on the dash. I like to steer too, like I done with my Daddy, but Johnboy won't let me behind the wheel of his van. Not yet, anyways.

After our wedding we spend the weekend up there in the trees and mountains, sleeping at nights in the back of the van. Johnboy keeps saying he's going to go fishing but doesn't. Instead he unfolds the beach chair he bought at Walmart outside Stockton, $19.99, and sits and swallows beer with the tape deck playing Rolling Stones. He says sixties songs all remind him of his tour. For dinner we have no fish but food, store bought, I fry up on the Coleman. At night it is peaceful. But it's not like being out on the road.

The best of our weekend is the drive home Sunday night. We come down alongside the Merced River and all the lupines are in bloom. They are my favourite night-driving flower: you can see 'em by moonlight and by headlight, little reflectors out there in the fields. Such white and spooky little flowers, millions of them, waxy, glowing. I would like to weave a great big chain of them and send them to my Daddy, back suffering prison time in Folsom.

They say to me, policemen judges caseworkers, what will become of you? and I say I have Johnboy to take care of me now. And Johnboy is deacon of the church,
VFW
chapter VP, auxiliary deputy, and has the preacher as witness. I am legal age now. I am an American just like you. Americans can do what we like.

What I don't tell them is I will just wait for Daddy. I'll stay here with Johnboy, who takes care of me, and be good. I like to sing in church and wax his van, but don't tell me to stop thinking of Daddy. Daddy is the one planted inside of me.

We sleep near roadside always, in the Pontiac; we drive off into some little dark corner of a field about two hours before dawn. Beneath cottonwoods, near riverbanks, is where we like to park. We get out and swim in the river. Daddy tells me stories. We laugh and have jokes. We go to sleep.

I hate to remember them wrestling Daddy away, Daddy yelling while they shove him in their car, No peace for the wicked!

The trail out of Tahoe with Johnboy Sunday night comes from the mountain in steep canyon walls and gorge, winds down the river for miles and miles until the valley flattens it out to a road just like any other. Then the lupines disappear and we have the night smells, manure, crops, irrigation ditches.

I was a little girl, we liked the straight highways, my Daddy and me. Daddy says, On a straight road, Face, we make
time
.

Johnboy is a much softer person than my Daddy. By far. Big and soft and easy, which is why I like him so. He's a locksmith. I like the little tufts of beard he has grown all along the line of his chin. His hair to me is the colour of honey. And his cheeks, all pink. His mouth happy, especially sucking on a beer. My Daddy will drink too but in a different style. Such as one afternoon, when we were staying in Montana, Daddy working housepainter up in Flathead Valley for the Swede — I remember the Swede well: big, floppy moustache and skin speckled with white paint. Next to him my Daddy looks like a brown stick. What happens is, after a couple of weeks the Swede owes Daddy money and we want to leave. We go looking for the Swede one afternoon. We go to a house to collect but the Swede ain't there. We go to another house — ain't there either. We start in on roadside bars where the Swede likes to drink. I wait in the car. At each bar we stop at my Daddy walks inside, madder and madder, and has a drink, looking for the Swede. Then he gets back in the Pontiac and we race down the highway, still looking. Finally Daddy gets fighting with an Indian near Missoula, after almost sixty miles of bars, and hits the Indian with a bottle out there in the parking lot. Out cold. Jumps into the Pontiac, where I'm waiting, scared, and we take off out of there and drive all the way to Oregon, I think.

In Coeur d'Alene a trucker tries to get me up into his cab while Daddy's in the truck-stop shower. “Little Vetnamee girl, Cambojan, suckee suckee,” trucker says. Disgusts me. Daddy comes out, his hair all slicked back, wet and shiny looking, looking so young and handsome in fresh white tee and jeans; you can see the little scar inside his forearm he picked up on R&R, Sydney Australia. He steps up behind the fat trucker and chops him with his bare hand. We roll him over then, take his wallet, go on our way.

Now I know my Johnboy ain't like that. He's more gentle, like a great big, soft bear. He's deacon in the church. When we lie together he pretends to growl. He says he respects me 'cause of all the people in Visalia I am the one who has travelled the most and experienced things.

Most of all I am the one who thinks. Thinking is something I learned from my Daddy; I learned it in my all-night driving. Daddy says, You see, in some ways it is a marvellous and wonderful, rich experience for a child, driving.

When Johnboy and me drive home in the van through the lupine fields and then across the wide, flat, sweet-smelling valley with irrigation hissing from big pipes rolled out in the fields and the sound of things out there growing — why, I am the one most at home and he is the one always has a secret little bit of wishing that he was back at the condo, with beer, hot dogs, tacos, cake, stucco, waterbed, La-Z-Boy. We live in the development outside of Visalia.

When I first met Johnboy that night at the church, I think he's a richie. He wears a tie and jacket to church, jacket powder blue. When he offers me a ride back to the motel, I go with him and we drive around in the van, and then instead of the motel he brings me out to his condo. Outside Visalia. To me it's a castle.

My Daddy raised me without religion. On the trunks
of our cars he always paints in big, bright red letters
ANYONE CAN READ, FEAR NOT!
He would say, We're on the road now, Babyface; we worship wide-open spaces; none of these towns and eyesores is right for us. We get all the Lord Almighty we need driving ourselves into sunset each evening. This way he'd talk when feeling especial good and roll down the window on his side, stick out his head, and yell, Yip, yip, yippee.

Which was right, because things didn't go well for us in the towns. We met in Bakersfield, where I was working in the little Vetnamee store, not even going to school, sweeping up, selling jujubes. Daddy pays 'em just to take me out of there, but even so there's a fight.

Once my Daddy got a job on a sewer crew, Casper Wyoming. We live there five weeks. He's not the same man in the towns. They start him feeling bad. Itchy-twitchy, he calls it. Sundays he's off work and we drive around looking for something, neither of us knows what. We drive to the edge of the town, Casper Wyoming, turn around, drive to the end on the other side, turn around again. We go home watch TV. Monday, Daddy goes back off to work. He says, No one bother you. Tell 'em you're my wife — no one knows the age of Vetnamee girls anyhow. Besides, I love you, he says. I take care of you, Babyface, Sugarpie, Sweetheart.

He never talked this way except when we were in the towns. At night he would cry. I try to cook him dinners when he comes home but he likes better we go up to the highway, eat in one of our truck stops out there on the edge of town. Casper Wyoming. Where we bought the Pontiac.

Driving at night makes me sad, with sadness sweet as honey I can't stop eating. Daddy and me have gone through weather in all sorts of places: Dakota snowstorms, midnight hundred degrees in places like Barstow. I tell Johnboy now, sometimes when I'm feeling blue, just what Daddy used to sometimes say—Baby, let's drive to Texas! I say it this morning just before Johnboy leaves for work.

Johnboy gets all hot. He says, Drive to Texas! Ain't you grateful? I have saved you from your Daddy. I have give you room to grow. I have brought you to the grace of the Lord.

I am not really serious, but still. It wouldn't have to be Texas. Could be anywhere at all.

He just ties on his tool belt and stomps out the door. He loves his job; he's always first on the whole street to leave for work. First in all Visalia maybe. I go out through the sliding glass door onto the little porch where the Hibachi sits, look down and watch him cross the parking lot. It's early day and the sun throws a long shadow cross the cement. Johnboy's the only one out there. No one else goes to work this early; their cars are still scattered all over — vans, Trans Ams, pickups — and bikes and plastic tricycles on the lawns, and flagpoles, and grass hissed at night by the sprinkler or otherwise it gets burnt into prickly little stubs. Sprinkler shuts off a little time before dawn.

Oftentimes me and Daddy roll right through these farm towns, these valley towns at night and pull up curbside or in some driveway. We tug off our clothes and go lie out there on the thick, sweet, wet lawns and let the mist of water soak right through us. We lie there looking up at the stars while the poor ones like Johnboy are in their houses asleep.

What can I say? I stand there on the porch in the morning sun with a mug of coffee, wearing a new nightgown, peek-a-boo, he bought me on Victoria Secret, watching him fiddling with the keys of his van, trying to get the door open. He'll look up at me.

You're a misfit, that's what you are, he'll yell. You make sure to lock up that porch door when you go inside!

I wave and he heaves into the front seat and drives away.

In towns at night, when we were feeling clean and empty, Daddy and me liked to slip into homes on little missions. Roll past a home and Daddy points and says, That one. Lets me out at the corner, all dark and quiet, and tells me what he wants. Sometimes it's something easy: rake from the garden, kitchen knife. Sometimes harder. He'll say, Get me a bar of bathroom soap, little one. Or, Fetch me a bedside clock.

I like to slip into the houses, darkness, stay low on the floor. No one ever wakes. I'm good now but Daddy's the best. Once he comes back with a dog collar, big one too, like a Dobie, something mean; says
Rexie
on the collar. Daddy has a way with animals.

Johnboy has lived in this wonder valley all his life; his mom and pop and sisters live in a deluxe trailer park, other side of the city of Visalia from us, work in a factory, work in a health-care centre. We don't see 'em much. They are backsliders. John's Born Again, and the Church, the Pentecostals, now they are his family.

Last night, Sunday night, we drove down, twisting alongside the Merced River past little meadows and hillsides of shiny lupine. I got my toes curled on the cool edge of the dash like I like; we stop at the store coming out of Yosemite for Fritos and beer. I am listening to the sounds of the night driving, crackling of the cellophane bag, when Johnboy reaches in for another handful, radio noise, wind slipping in through loose corners of shut windows. Johnboy reaches over to pat my feet. I am convinced in these kinds of moments that I have waiting for me a destiny, just like my Daddy said when we first met, Bakersfield; the way he would tell me and make me believe, over campfires we set up in little roadside pull-ins in the Rocky Mountains.

Johnboy always trying to get me to tell about life with Daddy. What did he do with you? What did he like? How old was you when you met up with him?

I liked to lean over the fires when they were almost out so I could smell the smoke and get a little of it in my hair and see the last coals glowing. The red embers looked like cities burning and flickering from a plane up high above.

They let me see Daddy just the once, while he's still at county jail.

Locksmith, he says. Ha ha.

I think of our poor Pontiac parked off somewhere in some sheriff's lot, getting dusty and hungry for the road. Probably sold by now, Johnboy says: auction, convict goods. Daddy says nonetheless he'll come to fetch me. Nonetheless, Babyface. Just be ready.

A destiny is something like the stars you see twinkling in the midnight sky when you are travelling across Wyoming. A destiny is the place where you will end up, says Daddy, all happy, with problems forgot and sorrows eased. It is the place you lie with all your friends around, sipping drinks, with the smell of flowers. There'll be a soft little stream and more flowers floating by.

I feel I am getting closer to it while I am travelling at night. Even with Johnboy. My destiny is a seed that the night and all the trips I've taken with Daddy has planted in me. Even if the destiny dries up and hides whenever we stop, and in the daytime. Even if I can't show it to Johnboy, can't tell him what it is when he asks — he'll never understand, I think sometimes. But I will love and try to teach him like Daddy taught me. Like when we'd stop at gas stations somewhere after midnight — Spearfish, Moline, Shelby, Farmington — they would wipe the windshield of the Pontiac and say to Daddy as he was about to pay, Where you going, mister? and Daddy'd look them straight in the eye and say, Up and beyond now, up and beyond is where I'm headed.