Truants (24 page)
“Rain,” Louisa said.
“It’s a sandstorm.”
“Five bucks,” Louisa said to him. “A little rain.”
Will smiled: “Look at that.”
It was what is called a regular sandstorm. The weather fell flat, the pressure grew weird and the color of the sky became gray and then ocher. We could see the semitrailers in front of us listing in the wind and Louisa responded energetically by hauling our own steering wheel around a quarter turn to keep us on the highway. The traffic stepped it up, everyone going sixty-five, seventy. The speed was senseless or suicidal, since the storm crossed the highway miles ahead of us exactly like a brown curtain in a big yellow room. Will told us to roll up the windows and he managed to firm the vents closed. A 1952 Chevrolet was constructed before planned obsolescence, and sealed like that the old machine rode eerily quiet. When the brown wall of sand swallowed the sun, and we slipped into the wall, it was like space travel. Louisa turned on the lights effectively creating two yellow spots on our fenders. Ahead, we could only see the two feeble taillights of a huge gray truck we’d been following. All else was deep twilight.
It was like driving underwater, except for the noise. The sand blasted across the car in a continuous friction; it was misting the windows.
It flew by in thick runs, hiding the lights sometimes. We all squinted forward for the red dots. We were traveling twenty miles an hour.
“What do I do, follow this guy?” Louisa asked Will.
“Yeah, stay with him,” Will said. “Watch that he doesn’t stop.”
The windshield matted with a million sand scratches, making it hard to see.
“Jesus! What is this stuff?” Her face was up over the wheel, craned forward. The brown sand would pile on the wiper blades and then blow away, pile up and blow away.
Like snow. I had seen snow once. My father had taken me fishing near Flagstaff in late September, the last September I was with him, and it had snowed. Where he got the idea to go fishing with me remains a mystery. Father Takes Son Fishing as Last Resort. I don’t know if he knew what fishing was; I didn’t. He was very low-key about the outing: “Just get away for a day or two … get …
out
.” And: “It should be fun. Give us a chance to talk.” It did give us a chance to talk, mainly in the damaged BMW as we drove north: “Looks like rain,” etcetera. We both knew that when people start saying
Looks like rain
to each other, they are desperately hoping the
next
sentence will be the one:
I’m sorry
or
I love you
. Or even:
What’s the matter?
We had packed down to “Hidden Stream” in a rocky gorge to fish and camp and
talk
, I guess, and the enterprise grew near worthy when we started walking down the steep canyon over the genuine boulders. I mean it was real walking; we could have fallen or something. As I said, he didn’t really know what he was doing, despite his map, but his spirit was right and it was downhill, going in. He played his life by ear; he could figure this out. I remember his back in front of me, lurching carelessly down from rock to rock the way you’d climb over furniture on moving day. And though he may have not known what he was doing, at least he looked right, like an ad for Pendleton shirts. He knew how to look.
At Hidden Stream, he prepared our fishing gear as best he could, allowing that he had forgotten the last segment of my pole, and in the deep gray mountain weather before the first snowflake could fall, we actually fished. At first we fished the same hole, an eddy the size of a double bed, but that got quiet and standing strangely there holding that equipment over the water, we should have talked. Even: “What am I going to do with you?”
So he moved upstream two holes, and it started to snow. The weather came over the mountain. It didn’t build up; the snow just came over us.
My father, already frustrated with the stupid trip which one of his pals had probably suggested as the antidote, blew what he could of his top. Fortunately, his rage found the borrowed equipment first, and his pole now lies eternally hidden in Hidden Stream. We gave up the concept of camping overnight.
The car was already crested with quilts of snow and the road gone. He was angry and, brushing the snow from the car, yelled, pushing my door open from within, “Get in!”
I did and I looked at his face, red from the cold, and he looked at me. His hand came over my head, pushing the snow off.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him in the little car.
He backed the car into the ruts of the mountain road and began easing us down toward Flagstaff.
“I know,” he said. But he never said,
So am I
.
The sand whipping the metal surface of our car became a harder buzz, a rushing sound. There was no sand
in
the car, but you could taste something, a dryness, almost dust.
“Is this the right road?” I asked.
“Road?” Louisa said.
“I don’t think so,” Will said. “We must have veered off or that truck led us here.” Louisa continued at fifteen miles an hour, the car at times tilted far left and far right. The tilting was my least favorite part.
“No,” Will finally said. “This isn’t the right road. We’d better pull over and wait it out.”
“Yes, and where?” Louisa said. “Maybe we
are
pulled over.”
“Ease the car right a bit and park it. Be sure to turn off the lights.”
We were enclosed like people in a tent and I should have told them right then. I should have gathered my vibrating bones together and confessed.
**************
Will was talking to Louisa, explaining that we turned off the lights to avoid someone running into us, which is how people are killed in sandstorms. He went on about the fact that we were probably north of Wendover, Nevada, and that he did not know how long the sand would blow. He asked us if we knew about the Enola Gay which is a weird question anywhere, and then he told that story about Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-52, named Enola Gay, and that Enola Gay had trained for its Hiroshima run at Wendover, Utah, and that Enola Gay was Paul Tibbet’s mother’s name. He asked if we’d like bombers named after us. I said just a small one and revised it: just a bomb.
“His mother?” Louisa said.
The sand rushed and lulled. It sounded as though we were aboard an aircraft, over an ocean, headed far away. I went into a bad, dry, carsick sleep and later, when I sat up, the sandstorm seemed to be abating.
“Try your door,” Will said.
I unlatched it, but it wouldn’t budge. Sitting on the seat, using posture I’d once assumed to try to pull a phone cord from a wall, I pushed it with my feet open to a six-inch space and the sand started blowing in. So I quit that, crunched the door closed on the sand, and exited through the window, in a motion I’d once used to leave an automobile aboard a train. The air was still dusty and charged with something else, an electricity, something, but it was good and clearing.
We were not, according to any visible evidence, on a road. I pulled great portions of the fine dust away from the driver’s door, scooping room to open it. It was the kind of hairy dust which gathered around the corners of our house in Phoenix when I was a child, the kind of dust you couldn’t even keep in your fist.
Louisa roused, looking surprisedly at Will when she saw her arm clutching his. “Yeah,” she said as if she hadn’t been out. “What is this? Are we camping?”
They joined me outside the car. Night was coming up fast, the bowl of low mountains which ringed us rose higher every minute.
“Well,” Will said, after looking around. “Here we are.”
“Where?” Louisa always had to ask.
There was one light in the world, a speck below us, and we fell silently like soldiers on patrol, our mission understood, and kicked down the slope through sand and across the sage plain. Stepping high, plunging into the sand, I thought,
this is it: Life on Antarctica
. But it was better, walking, moving, being explorers, survivors, I was sure.
Louisa grew perverse and started a little conversation with herself that mainly consisted of the phrase: “Hey, sandy enough for you?”
She’d lag and Will would laugh and push her forward, and she’d take turns pulling his arms, the way the pioneers pulled handcarts. Oh, we were having a fine time out in the sandy night.
“I hope it’s not just some rancher’s lightpole,” Will said. “We’ll have to go back and stay with the car.”
“I hope it’s a phone booth. I’m going to call the police and report you two guys.”
I didn’t say anything as I was now chronically unsure of my hopes. So far the things I’d hoped for couldn’t be trusted.
The light focused a bit and became square as we approached, but it wasn’t clearly a small window until we were fifty yards away.
“A house,” I said. “I think it’s a house.” And I ran ahead.
No, not a house. It was an old truck-camper sitting in the ground, looking like tornado litter. Except for the light.
Before I knocked at the door I felt the nose behind my knee, and I reached down and found the dog’s head with my palm, just to measure his size and move him back a bit. “Oh Wolf,” I said. “Good old Wolf.”
The door opened. A shadow loomed out of the smoky interior.
“Lost again!” the shadow laughed. It was a husky voice, a woman’s. “Lost again! Come on in!”
I stepped in and fell across onto the bed because of the way the floor tilted. I couldn’t see her features for the sage smoke that filled the place, but she had red hair, years long. The entire residence listed heavily to starboard, and the lantern that hung crazily from the ceiling rocked to our every step.
Taking a firm grip on the edges of the bed I said, “We are lost.” And I added, “Again.”
The woman bent toward me, the red nimbus of her hair oranging in the light, and she peered closely at my face. “Why you
do
make the water look just like itself.”
“We were wondering,” I went on, renewing my purchase on the furniture in case I had to leap away from this demented woman.
“Let’s bring your friends in,” she said, going out the door. “Eat some fish and hear the story.”
This large, red-haired woman took us in.
“Rowena,” she said her name. And she maneuvered the little propane stove suddenly, and we were eating platefuls of bacon and trout—with tomatoes for dessert. We ate the tomatoes like apples and passed around a saltshaker. I wanted to ask her where she got her salt.
The close crooked room made everyone talk, and before Rowena finished distilling a viscous residue she cheerfully called coffee. She had heard the whole story; except for the dark side of mine, of course.
She moved constantly, humming, producing utensils, napkins, combs from the many large pockets in her skirt, but when she stopped, bent over her mug of coffee, leaning toward me to listen, her head tilted, her eyes asquint, I thought:
I’ve been seen. This woman has seen me
. I fully expected her to say, “Now tell me the real story,” but she stood after a while, gathered the dishes and taught Louisa a new song: “Work for the Night is Coming.”
In the morning I woke on one shelf in the camper and looked across into the open face of Louisa. She was lying on the bed.
“Hi,” she said.
Having someone watch you sleep is an embarrassing experience. There you were asleep and someone is inspecting you. I mean, you were unconscious, right. It’s embarrassing because, I guess, it’s intimate. Maybe, I could explain this if I had an hour. All I can say is that somehow I warmed to the idea of former daredevil Louisa Holz watching me sleep.
“Where is everybody?” Will and Rowena, if that was her real name, were not in the little space with us.
“Where are we?”
“Oh, I see.”
“Sorry. I don’t know. They are gone, don’t you think. I mean, we’re alone; they’re not here.” She waved her arms. “Is that a better answer?”
I decided to experiment and mimicked her words: “We are alone.”
“Yep.” She raised her chin at me. “Try something.” It was the same nasty challenge which she offered everyone, but this version was graced with a smile. She smiled genuinely at me. Do you see what I am saying? It was a real smile. I mean, she could have been flirting with me it was that good. I returned it, keeping part for myself.
I did not think it would happen that way, in some tin shed in the plain morning light. Actually, I did not think. It was morning; this girl whom I had been through a sandstorm with, had been watching me sleep, and I was awake, somehow bold, and I did not think.
I slipped off my bunk, my bare feet padding to the sandy floor and my bare legs meeting hers. Her legs were so smooth, so sudden. Her hands were cold under my shirt, but her back was warm under my hands, and her legs—her legs under mine as we pressed against the side of the cabinet. I leaned back against the counter and it was cold; some water from the dishes sopped into the back of my shirt as she was in my arms fully.
I don’t know. Memory is okay in time sequences, but when time heats like that, like water in an instant, and vanishes, memory won’t help. I could make something up, but it wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be fair. The other parts that I do remember, I keep to myself.
I hadn’t thought it was going to be like that. And I hadn’t anticipated her silence afterward, her jumping back into her bed, the camper mattress, and pulling the covers up to her knees and her knees up to her chin.
I dressed. It was morning, I was supposed to. Still it was an activity conducted with an air of emergency. I stumbled pulling on my pants; it was as if it were the first time I had dared such a feat.
“Say something cynical,” I said to her. Her arm supported her head as she lay in the rumpled bed, eyeing me.
“Nope,” she said. “Say it yourself.” There was that smile again, across her eyes.
I bent and tied my shoes.
When I looked up, she still held her glance, and we had what is called “eye-contact” which is a term and an activity which drives me crazy.
Eye-contact
. My face warmed.
“You’re sweet,” she said. I wasn’t sure at that moment if I rose to anger at that remark because she meant it and it scared me or because she meant it and it neutralized me. It just didn’t seem a thing to say.