Book Two
8.
ON THE MAP IT WAS JUST A PALE BLUE EGG BETWEEN two Nevada towns we’d never heard of, but when we veered off the access road and onto the graveled shoreline, the silvery water glowed like some giant gasoline rainbow, poisonous and beautiful.
How long had we driven in that hazy heat?
A black and red sign at the water’s edge warned of unexploded munitions. DANGER: COULD CAUSE SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH.
Maxito cried, “I want swimming –” He’d been promised swimming.
How do you explain to a two-year-old that some people thought it was a good idea to spend decades testing weapons on a rare desert lake?
Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking? I sighed at the meanness of it all. Like lime juice in your eyes to better resemble your colonizer.
WE’D LEFT PORTLAND on a rainy morning. All that lush green and damp gray. Maxito cried from his carseat when the turquoise trailer came off its hitch two blocks from home – the ruthless sound of metal scraping asphalt. But Portland magic appeared in the form of a sleepy hipster who tumbled out of a corner café, calling, “Hey, my grandparents used to have a trailer like that,” and “I know just how to hitch it.”
We rolled out of town then like every cliché, Sol waxing romantic about the life we’d finally have. Some perfect queer family under the sun.
Driving with Sol, we only listened to her music – to Bowie or Dylan or Freakwater or Steely Dan. The first year we were together she simply pushed eject whenever I chose the CD, so I’d given up. I liked Sol’s music well enough, but I wondered what kind of music I might listen to these days if I hadn’t spent eight years deferring. It made me sad to think I didn’t know what I liked anymore, didn’t know what I’d choose.
We drove a couple hundred miles, then spent a snowy night camped at the edge of a little town full of scruffy mullets, Wrangler jeans, and old hippies waiting for the UFOs.
Morning and a couple hundred miles of dotted yellow lines and green highway signs. Portobello mushroom burgers with friends in a Sierra mountain town that smelled of pine. We swam in a river and Sol cried on the rocky bank. Sol always cried at clean water. Her father was on trial for his oil company’s genocidal pollution in Latin America. She’d gone to college and veterinary school on the profits of destruction. It was part of the reason she felt morally obliged not to charge people much for her services. Like she was repaying some of her father’s karmic debt by tending parakeet wounds.
A couple hundred miles then of cowboy bars and neon-lit brothels and here we were now at this glowing lake and clean water had become a precious thing.
We had to keep going.
IN A CREEPY motel office in a town of old miners’ graveyards, there was a napkin-lined basket full of muffins and a Post-It note that read “Martha made these. FREE.”
Free muffins, Maxito decided, could almost make up for a long and waterless day driving. “Muffins,” he hummed, swaying in his fuzzy blue pajamas. “I love agua and muffins.”
Our room smelled like cigarettes.
Sol read to Maxito from a book about unpolluted rivers and lonely rabbits and the two of them fell asleep on the queen-sized bed. I sat on the toilet because that’s where the wi-fi worked. “Dear Nevada,” I status-updated on Facebook. “I’m lost.” I checked my email.
From: evedebona@yahoo.com
To: arielgore@earthlink.net
Subject: Santa Fe
Tiniest,
I’ve been trying to call you all day. You’re either out of range or you’re avoiding me. It is urgent that you contact me. DO NOT COME TO SANTA FE. If you do come, DO NOT PARK YOUR TRAILER ON THE PROPERTY.
Love,
Mom
I READ THE email a couple of times. Surely she was kidding. Do not come to Santa Fe? She had to be kidding. She used to call me on April Fools’ Day mornings to tell me she’d adopted a giant frog she had to walk on a leash or that she was unexpectedly pregnant with Anderson Cooper’s baby. But it was too late for April Fools.
I crept out of the motel room. The warm night smelled like truck exhaust. I stepped back into the free muffin office and asked the man behind the desk to point me to the nearest bar, but he shook his head.
“Nothing like that in this town.” He looked like an aging Anthony Perkins from Psycho with those dark little eyes and cleft chin.
Do not come to Santa Fe. Sure. Who needed Santa Fe? Why would we come to Santa Fe? Maybe we could just settle here in this weird little barless town on the edge of a nuclear test site.
I turned to leave the office, but Anthony Perkins called after me. “I’ll give you a night cap, little lady.” He poured a couple of shots of tequila into two Styrofoam cups, pushed mine across the desk.
I wasn’t going to refuse. “Thanks.” The drink was warm and rough, but it soothed my throat.
Anthony Perkins winked at me, lit a menthol cigarette. “You know there’s a whole army base under that lake, don’t you? Yes, Ma’am. You came from the lake didn’t you?” He knocked back his tequila, poured us each another Styrofoam shot. “It’s a submarine naval training station under there. Good one, huh? The Russians or the Chinese or nobody never gonna suspect a submarine base in the middle of the desert, are they? Submarine training in the desert.” Anthony Perkins kind of squinted and laughed at the same time. “Is that your sister you’re traveling with?” He gestured toward our room with that chin.
“Yeah. My sister.” I nodded. “I better get back to my sister.”
Anthony Perkins lifted his Styrofoam cup and smiled at me. “To family,” he said.
I tapped the edge of my cup against his. “To family.”
A couple hundred miles then down the 95 in the already-hot morning, the odd ghost town rising up from the brown-green sand and shrub. Nevada.
I studied my map. Lake Mead wasn’t so far. Surely this blue hawk-shaped thing on the map just outside Vegas would be swimmable.
AS SOL AND Maxito splashed in Lake Mead, I collected garbage on the shore and dialed Maia’s number.
“Hey, Mama,” she breathed into the phone.
“Hey, Mai Mai. So, I got this email from Nonna?”
Maia sighed. “Yeah. We were staying at this hotel in Santa Fe, but we got kicked out. I don’t know what Nonna did to them, but the cops came and kicked us out.”
In the lake, kids threw their plastic balls and squealed and splashed while their parents drank beer and yelled at them from their beach chairs on the shore.
“What’s wrong with the duplex, Mai Mai?”
“Well, Nonna kind of had the house, like, gutted. See, she doesn’t want it to be a duplex, so – and, well, she didn’t get a building permit or anything, right? So she doesn’t want the trailer on the land. Because it might draw attention. Then she’ll get fined ten thousand dollars which she doesn’t have because, you know, she gave the rest of her money to the contractor and, should I go get her?”
“Yeah, put her on the phone.”
I looked across the lake’s surface, out past the kids and all the motorboats and water skiers, the brown-red rocks and mountains beyond.
A cool two billion years ago, this was the Western coastline of North America. California and Oregon hadn’t yet come crashing in. I thought about continental collisions and inland sea floods, volcanic eruptions and the ash and lava flow that would seal this rock and land together for a while. Now the earth’s rift crust stretched to pull itself back apart here, separate continents still desperate to diverge.
“Finally,” my mother said by way of hello.
“Where I am I supposed to go, Mom? I sold my house. I’m traveling with a toddler here. I can’t just not come to Santa Fe.”
My mother kind of groaned an exhale into the phone. “Ariel, don’t get hysterical. I’m going to build us a beautiful home. In the meantime I’m going to rent us a beautiful little guest house. I’ve just found something on Craigslist. It’s small. One room. It sleeps five. The migrant workers of the world would certainly consider it quite luxurious. But, honestly, Ariel, if it’s not good enough for you, get your own place. I can’t take care of everyone. I have cancer.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Mom, this is insane. That duplex was partly mine. You just ... gutted it?”
My mother hummed. “All right, I’ll tell you this, but only because I want you to understand. The contractor and the worker I’ve hired didn’t want this job. The worker is suicidally depressed. He’s been through something no one should have to go through. The contractor is bankrupt at nearly age seventy. He’s wonderful. He has a Ph.D. in Anaïs Nin.”
“You’re serious, Mom? Anaïs Nin? This qualifies him to take a wrecking ball to the house?”
“Don’t be dramatic, Ariel. I hired them both out of self-imposed early retirement. I had to plead with them. These men need this project. I may be dying, but I can give these men their lives back. Just try to think about somebody other than yourself, Ariel.”
I felt like throwing up, but I just closed my eyes. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
Maybe it wasn’t Nevada’s fault, but right then I hated Nevada. I stared at it for a long time, Nevada. A few tears fell, but the hot desert air just baked them into my cheeks. There’s a color called blue and that’s what the sky was. Maxito came bounding out of the water, at first a silhouette against that blue, then into full color with his red swim trunks and green bug-eye goggles. “It’s cold water, Mama.”
Sol stepped up behind him, took one look at me. “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
THAT NIGHT AT a dark campground picnic table after Maxito had gone to sleep in the trailer, I spelled it out for Sol.
She quietly filled her glass pipe with weed, lit the bowl and breathed it all in. “So the contractor knows a lot about erotica?”
I sipped my whiskey. “Anaïs Nin just wrote erotica to make money. Her major works are – you know – modernist surrealist – like – Cities of the Interior. About architectural spaces that don’t actually exist.”
“Oh.” Sol took another hit of weed and nodded. “That don’t exist.”
JUST A FEW miles in the morning to the Hoover dam and across the Arizona border where they asked Sol for proof of her naturalized citizenship and searched our trailer for human cargo as if Arizona was an independent country and this was an international border.
At a café in Kingman, I put in a few hours teaching my online writing class while Sol and Maxito killed time at a park. I checked Santa Fe Craigslist for housing, found a listing for a quaint little adobe on Canyon Road and called the landlord.
He said, “Sure, come and look.”
A couple hundred miles then and a night in a rented teepee. I watched the quarter moon through the smoke hole and I prayed for nothing in particular, prayed that I wasn’t right here and now irrevocably ruining Maxito’s life, that I wasn’t ruining my own.
Just a few months earlier, in Portland, I’d had what I always imagined I wanted: A partner and a home of my own, work in my chosen field, Maia making her way to an undergraduate degree. Some kind of an all in the list of checkmarked boxes I called life. I thought of my Gammie, and the way she’d pour herself a nice, tall vodka tonic whenever she saw my mother enter a room and sip her drink and whisper under her breath, “If there isn’t chaos, there soon will be.”
Weak morning coffee and a couple hundred miles and the highway sign read Welcome to the Land of Enchantment. Casinos, desert, heat. A mid-spring dust storm held the highway in a terracotta haze.
Do not come to Santa Fe. When we got there, I didn’t want to stop at the gutted house, didn’t want to tell Maia or my mother we’d arrived. So we just sped past the duplex that maybe wasn’t a duplex anymore. It didn’t look any different than it had back in November when I flew down and made the offer on it. Flat roof, faux-adobe stucco walls. A long rectangle of a place set on the property at an odd angle, as if it had landed there accidentally. A few dented pickup trucks were parked in the driveway, but no other evidence hinted at demolition or construction.
We drove down Old Santa Fe Trail and up the hill to Canyon Road to look at that quaint adobe. The landlord had said “sure, come and look,” but when we pulled up with that turquoise trailer, two road-tired and tattooed queers and their sugar-faced kid, well, that landlord came running out and yelling into the street. “Do you know where you are?”
I didn’t know.
“It’s Canyon Road,” Sol whispered.
“So?” I was confused.
“This is the center of the art trade in all of America,” the landlord screamed. “This is the Wall Street of Santa Fe!”
I didn’t quite know what he meant by all that, except that we wouldn’t be renting any quaint little adobe.
The landlord was white like me but he called after us: “I am one of the premiere Native art dealers in the world!” And he shook this creepy wooden doll at us like a warning.
I squinted at Sol as we drove away. “This is the Land of Enchantment?”
We checked into the Econo Lodge, into a room next to the indoor pool.
“Swimming,” I whispered to Maxito.
And his tired face lit up.
“Come on.” I took his sweaty hand.
Outside the picture windows, the Santa Fe sunset painted things orange and we all sank into the chlorinated blue. Just three travelers. Submarine training in the desert.