Truants (18 page)
I thought: this is it then, three of us now. We all got in that dependable used car. It takes a while for some of us to feel at home anywhere but in the familiar furniture of a moving car, watching the hills climb trees into the future.
Will test drove the car. He toured it around Kingman for a while, moving through the gears, even reverse, stopping once to buy a “new” retread spare tire and to fill a gallon jug with water. When he slammed the trunk, a three-slam maneuver, he climbed back in and said, “Okay, I think we can make it.”
“Before we go too far, before we reach your son’s house, do you think you could teach me how to drive this thing?” I said. “I mean, I should know how to drive a standard shift.” The gears and their harmonics fascinated me.
He downshifted, creating a sound that Leonard was good at, and wheeled the auto into a Safeway parking lot. He stepped out.
“Move over,” he said, and I slid beneath the bus-size steering wheel. He got in the passenger side.
With the car shut off he marched me through the gears, three forward, one back, trying to get me to time the clutch right. The moment of ignition sounded a bit angrier than when he’d done it, but when I let go of the key, the car seemed correct. I ground the mechanism into first and motored to a large circle in the lot while Louisa, fatigued in the back, cried out, “Hit something! Hit something!” I tried to go to second gear three times, but on the third grinding I called, “Abort! Abort! Stay in first!”
Finally, in the alley, behind the store, I touched into second gear, a very satisfying condition, and for the first time, I thought: This is it; I’m driving. I am operating a motor vehicle. We did brush a tiny fragment of the vegetable-garbage bin back there, but I attributed it to the quarter turn of slack in the wheel.
Then we backed up, turned about, downshifted, tried the lights and wipers and honked the horn. Several times. Will seemed to be enjoying the lessons as much as I was, and Louisa said “Hooray!” Finally, Will had me stop and he and Louisa got out.
“Time to solo, buddy,” he said. “Twice around the building. No collisions, and do not kill the engine.”
So I backed away from them easily, slid into first and gently moseyed around the store. When I emerged the first time, my waving almost cost a woman her full grocery cart, but I recovered and swerved onward, to complete my rounds and receive a full complement of applause, which I acknowledged with the horn.
It was near noon and Louisa was already gliding to sleep in the back, when Will motored the old car onto the desert floor, and we began our assault on three and a half inches of red line on the map. Northwest. The desert between Phoenix and Kingman, even if you walk part way, is a garden compared to the stretch between Kingman and Las Vegas.
I was very tired, but I felt I had to stay awake, to talk to our eighty-four year old chauffeur and friend. But my eyes would start to close, and I’d snap forward and say, “You okay; you awake?” and Will would say, “Sure, relax.” The intervals in this repetitive interview grew longer, I think, as we dropped imperceptibly across the desert toward the Colorado River and Lake Mead. I do remember the plain becoming a series of irregular and severe hills, barren as the moon, and the ashen purple color of anything that has been burned ten million times.
“Hey!” I started. “You okay? You awake?” I threw my hands on the dash; Will was asleep. Another breath told me we were also stopped in the parking lot overlooking the Hoover Dam. Will sat up slightly and said, “Sleep for a while.” So we slept in the hum of fourteen air-conditioners on the Winnebagos around us.
As after all naps, I awoke beaten, cooked, drooling. Louisa and Will were leaning on the front of the car, talking. He was pointing things out, and said, “It was an awful time to be president. Just bad timing. He came in, things went kaput, and he got the blame. Then Roosevelt came along and was the hero.”
“Was he a hero?” Louisa asked.
“A giant. He still colors everything the country does.” Will smiled and said, “Hoover only got a bad name and this dam.”
“He didn’t have a good radio voice,” I said.
“Feeling better?” Will asked.
“Than what?”
Louisa moved around and rubbed my shoulders. We could see so far out onto Lake Mead that the blue changed shades three times.
“You kids should see this dam; you never know when you’ll be back this way,” Will said.
“We’re stopping to tour the dam?” I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s worth it,” Will said. “Vegas is only an hour away.”
“You’re stalling.”
He walked away.
There was something compelling about the size of things in the canyon, the narrowness of the gorge itself, the height of the dam, the way the tiny river pulled me over the edge every time I peeked. We went down the elevator with a small tour group. Most of the people spoke German.
“Maybe we could get jobs down here,” I said to Louisa. “Stay another two weeks.”
“Order some milk,” she said right back. “Leave before we’re paid.”
This shut me up, but I smiled thinking about Jay’s inevitable interview with the milkman. I could see Leonard, triumphantly standing amid one thousand glass bottles of fresh cold milk, smiling right at Jay. Through the rest of the tour, I scribbled on the picture postcards of the Dam. “Dear Jay Stisson, Howdy partner: isn’t milk good for your teeth? How are your bones, your vitamin D? The Phantom stalks you while you sleep! Take Care!”
“Dear Steeley: Hydroelectric power serves us all. Even Hall. With fond gratitude, Collin.”
The dam plant was massive. The generators were the size of the Blue Mesa Boarding Home, and they were all lined up in a row, tamed beasts, humming. The floor was painted green and shone with a cleanliness I hadn’t expected inside a dam. The huge room reminded me of a theater for some reason, perhaps because of the unreal size and color of things, the strange light. For one minute I had a flash of my father, the actor, strutting below our balcony platform, calling lines from “Mister Roberts” in his false baritone.
Will walked around like he owned the entire plant, pointing the cause-effect of things out to Louisa and to me, when I was listening. He said that the permanent and heavy crane on the ceiling was installed to move out the spent generators; if one ever failed after years and years. It was all a lesson in new dimensions.
***************
But the size of Hoover Dam doesn’t make full sense until you drive up and spill over the junction and glimpse the firewheel of Las Vegas spinning in the desert night. The brilliance quickens the eye, but more confusing is why in the devil the town is there in the first place. (I wondered this about more than one Nevada town.) One can imagine a founding father simply saying, “Let’s go out in the desert and enact our various lusts.” And the second founding father saying, “With electricity!” And click! the electric mecca opened, twenty-four hours a day.
From the front seat of our old pearl Chevy, sweeping down the highway toward the center of the star, it was hard to imagine that in one of those cathedrals of light, surrounded by the jingle-jangle of ten tons of loose change and flashing “Change” signs, ordinary people, citizens from all over the planet, squinted for the last time at the dull sheen on their final silver dollar.
We knew we were absolutely in Las Vegas proper when we hit the parking lot of the Dunes: under the lights of the parking lot, a shirtless boy walked around and around a gray Lincoln Continental, spraypainting it Sears blue.
“Hope he doesn’t get any on the windows,” I said as we passed the painter.
Will motored our little ship into the confusion of the Frontier’s parking lot. When he had parked, he said, “I’d better clean up a bit before going over to Robbie’s.’’ He got out.
“Are you killing time?” I said.
“I’m cleaning up!” he said firmly, taking his shaving kit and striding off toward the entrance of the casino. He was mad.
“Brilliant,” Louisa said. “Piss off the old man, why don’t you? Hurt his feelings.”
“Shutup, Louisa.”
“Just hurt his feelings.”
“Cease,” I said, adding “Holz!” because I knew it would get her.
“Don’t call me that!” She cuffed me hard across the ear, but missed with the second swing as I jumped out of the car.
“I’m going in too,” I said.
“Good deal. While you’re in there you can clean up too!”
I was going to yell something back, but our roles were confused enough it seemed to me. Clean up too. Actually, given the situation, it was a pretty nice thing to hear.
The sign before the casino read:
NO ONE UNDER TWENTY-ONE ADMITTED. STATE LAW: CHILDREN MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT.
I ignored it and stood up straight, saying “Dad, hey Dad,” everytime I felt someone give me the eye.
I found Will in the men’s room behind the casino, shaving over one of fourteen oval sinks. The attendant was listening to a baseball game on his radio. At the far end, a guy with half an inch of twenty-dollar bills in his mouth, washed his hands. I went to Will but he wouldn’t acknowledge me; he just stared at the lathered face in the mirror. The light in the room showed his eyes to be eighty-four years old. I said Hi, and, when he went on shaving, I turned on the water in the next sink and washed my face. My eyes looked eighty-five years old. It was good to wash, but the whole scene was miserable. Two men wash up in Las Vegas, not talking. I counted the after-shave bottles on the counter top: thirty-seven.
“Mind if I borrow your razor?” I asked him when he’d put it down.
He placed it near my sink and dried his ears.
I poised the razor three, four times over various planes of my face, not a hair in sight, and then lathered everything, part of my nose, everything, and started shaving. I figured that a razor might get some of the dirt the soap had missed.
“I’m sorry,” I said through the fluff. “I’m sorry about saying that out there.”
I think he nodded, but I wasn’t sure. A drunk came sliding down the counter, running his hand through the many sinks, finally stopping next to Will, glaring. He turned the water on full force and began slopping it generously over the front of himself and onto Will. I saw Will reach and turn it down. The man, of course, turned it up, knocking Will’s shaving kit into the mess. Will stood up and turned the water off, and retrieved his dripping bag. The man, half Will’s age, struck at the bag, knocking Will’s stuff all over. At this, the attendant got off his chair and started our way. But Will waved him back, saying to the drunk man:
“Be careful.”
“Be careful!” the man spat back, swinging at Will.
Then I saw Will counter the man’s arm, while delivering a quick flat slap to the man’s face. Before the guy could do anything, while he still reverberated from the blow, Will moved right behind him, forcing his arms up, and bent him into the sink, headfirst. I couldn’t move.
When he had dipped him healthily four or five times, Will tipped him back just in time for the attendant to drown the man’s sputterings in a fresh towel.
I picked up Will’s things, and we left. The man was now operating his own towel, shocked to a new sobriety. “Get some sleep,” Will shouted behind him. “You’ll feel better.”
In the parking lot, surrounded by groups of passing citizens saying, “If we’d only … if we’d only …” Will laughed.
“Poor guy,” he said.
“Where’d you learn that?” I said.
“Oh, I’ve done a little of everything.” He stopped. “Where’d you learn to shave?” He took my head in his hands and wiped away great portions of the shaving cream still roped around my nose and ears.
“Feel better, boys?” Louisa asked when we walked up to the car.
I drove, hoping Will’s post-combat exhilaration would last. It didn’t. As we made the jump from the electric glitter of the strip to the subdued squalor of the low-rent collar that surrounded it, Will descended. His eyes were trying to sink his face. He gave me expressionless directions through neighborhood after neighborhood.
“Will. Hey, Will, come on,” I said. “Isn’t this what you want? Come on! Here we are in Las Vegas! It’s magic!”
“Maybe we should have called him. Janice won’t like it.”
“Sure she will. They’re waiting for you.”
Then suddenly we were away, down a desert drive to a suburb. The yards were spacious, landscaped, many lit to highlight the imported cactus, bright ribbons of octotillo shooting upwards, and the obligatory cow skull half sunk picturesquely in the sand. The lay of the land had taken on a look suspiciously like my old Scottsdale neighborhood; I mean
we
had a skull in the front yard.
Will sat in the passenger seat, bent over with his hands between his knees. It was the very attitude of one about to moan.
After half an hour of the suburban crisscross, checking the address sheet six times by the light of the glove box (a task Will hated), we found Robbie’s house. The mailbox was a compartment attached to an antique mining car, sitting on a quaint section of antique mining rails. The drive curved past this monument, through a half acre cactus garden, each saguaro suddenly throwing its arms up in the sweep of the headlights. The house itself was all glass. A dozen granite pillars and forty sliding doors.
Louisa climbed out of the back and I came around before Will would get out of the car.
“How do I look?” he said.
“Fine. You look like Gary Cooper.”
“Paternal,” Louisa added.
He just stood there, a look in his eyes that later I’d wish I’d heeded.
“Come on, Will,” I said calmly. “This is your son’s house …”
“That doesn’t mean,” he said, “that it’s mine too.”
He walked away from us, striding like a cowboy to the sliding front door, where he pushed the doorbell. I could see a blue glow off on one side of the house; they were watching television in there. My father probably, in a family situation comedy, the divorced father of nineteen.
“Hey, kids! Come on up. Aren’t you going to meet my family?” Will said back to us. He said it the way those words are meant to be spoken. He was trying.
Louisa looked at me. “You go,” she said and smiled. “I can’t stand this family shit.”