American Elsewhere (3 page)

Finally they climb back over the barrier and begin the awkward journey down. As they descend, Norris takes one last glance up at the lights on the top of the mesa. “I wonder who it’s bringing here,” he says softly.

There is an angry shush from Zimmerman, as if the trees themselves could hear, and the men continue into the darkness in silence.

Mona Bright’s been to some pretty piss-poor funerals in her day, but she has to admit that this one takes the cake. It even beats her cousin’s funeral in Kentucky, when the grave was hand-dug in a tiny church graveyard. That was a pretty medieval affair, she knows, but at least then the gravediggers were all family members, and they treated the ceremony with a little dignity. Here in this miserable potter’s field in the middle of nowhere, there is no one to attend but her and the gravedigger, a local contractor with a backhoe who currently has his rattling old vehicle parked just beside the open grave. He hasn’t even turned it off, he just has it idling. He sits on the footstep and when he isn’t wiping his face clean of sweat he is eye-fucking her something fierce. Already she can see him formulating any number of lines he hopes might magically translate this sordid little afternoon into a quick fuck in whichever motel is closest.

She asks him what his next job is. He is surprised, and thinks and says, “Well, they got a parking lot they need leveled off in Bayton.”

Christ, she thinks. Gravedigging at two, parking lot at three. What an interesting little county her father chose to die in.

“You got anyone else coming?” he ventures.

“Doubt it.”

“Well. You want to go ahead and get on with the show?”

“There isn’t a minister coming or anything?”

“I believe you have to schedule him.”

“So it isn’t an automatic civil service or whatever?” she asks, and laughs morosely. “I thought this was God’s country.”

“Not for free, it isn’t,” says the gravedigger.

Where they are is Montana City, Texas, which is a joke of a name: it can only be called a city in that it has two traffic lights. One is broken, but they don’t count that against it. Mona had the option of transferring her father up to Big Spring, which is bigger in the sense that a gnat is bigger than a flea, but she doesn’t see why she should foot a dime more than she has to to plant her father, Earl Bright III, deep in this godforsaken soil. After all, he was a horrific skinflint, and it feels appropriate to stick him in a stretch of earth just as begrudging and hostile as he was in life.

The gravedigger climbs into his backhoe. “You want to say something?”

She thinks about it, and shakes her head. “It’s all been said.”

He shrugs, revs the engine, and starts it forward. Mona watches impassively behind her silvered sunglasses as the crumbly clay earth tumbles down to embrace the pine coffin below.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, yadda yadda yadda.

Earl, of course, had not been foresighted enough to write a will, so all of his belongings enter the complicated and cryptic world of probate. Or at least it would be complicated anywhere else, but here the judge plans to go elk hunting in a week, so they cut down the time before the heirship proceeding accordingly, because honestly, who cares.

On the appointed hour, Mona dutifully appears at the local probate court, a low-ceilinged place filled with the reek of burned coffee. It looks as if it moonlights as a VFW hall. There’s a moment of confusion when the officials see Mona, for though Earl was as white as snow, Mona’s looks are all her mother’s, so she is quite Mexican. But Mona was prepared for this—she has to be, in Texas—and the
appropriate forms and badges of identification mostly quell the questions. Then they get down to business.

Of a sort. The judge is present, but he’s got his feet up on the table and is utterly absorbed in his newspaper. Mona doesn’t mind. The easier this is, the better, because she’s looking for something specific, a treasure Earl would have never parted with even in his most extreme old age: his 1969 cherry-red Dodge Charger, the pride and joy he spent most of his life on, and which Mona was forbidden from ever driving. As a teenager she often dreamed of sitting in its leather seats and feeling the motor burst to life with the push of the pedal, the vibrations of the pistons dancing up the steering shaft and into her arms. Once, on a hot summer evening when she was sixteen, she tried to steal it for the night. She hadn’t even gotten it out of the garage before he caught her. Even today, the resulting scar has not healed.

So it is a very bitter grin that blossoms on her face when the gray-faced little court officer informs her that yes, that vehicle is still licensed to Mr. Bright, and as the deceased never indicated who it should go to she can claim it if she is willing. “By God, I am willing, sir,” she says. “I am damn willing.”

“All right,” he says, and makes a note. “And what about his other properties?”

This comes as a surprise. Judging by his living conditions, her father had been scratching out a miserable and penniless life in this tiny town. “What other properties did he have?” she asks.

Oh, a fair few, the officer tells her. The car, for instance, is located at a storage unit with several of his other belongings, and these are hers if she wishes. She shrugs and says, why not. There’s a small sum of cash, which she takes. There are also a few parcels of land he still owns, the officer says. These Mona turns down: she is well aware that her father has sold any land worth selling and has been living off the proceeds; the rest is unsellable scrub. The officer nods and tells her that just leaves the matter of the house.

“No sir, I do not want that flea-infested shack he was living in,” she tells him.

“Well, that’s good, because he didn’t own that,” he says. “That he was renting. This would be a house left to him in”—he checks the paper—“New Mexico.”

“It’s what? In New Mexico? I never heard of him owning a house out there.”

The officer turns the document around to show her. “Looks like he didn’t, originally,” he says. “It was left to him, but went unclaimed. In his case, it was left to him by one… Laura Gutierrez Alvarez?”

At that, Mona is almost struck dumb. Though the clerk is nattering on about New Mexico law and uniform probate law, Mona can hardly hear a word of it.

Momma
, she thinks? Momma had a house? Momma had a house in
New Mexico
?

Then, slowly, her shock turns to rage. She cannot believe that the old bastard never told her that. For years she peppered him with questions about her mother, whom she barely remembers save for a few childhood images of a thin, trembling woman who wept constantly and stared out of windows, yet never went outdoors. Mona never knew that her mother had once had a life beyond their tiny West Texas home; yet here, recorded in the fading ink of an ancient typewriter, a paper tells her of a paper that tells her of a deed in her mother’s name, which in turn tells her of another life far from here, a life before Earl, and Mona’s own birth, and all the bitter years they spent together as her father roughnecked across the country.

“What else can you tell me about it?” she asks.

“Well… not much. There’s nothing else in the original will, which is pretty basic. I suppose your father never acted on it.”

“Never? He just sat on it?”

“Seems that way. The will itself has an expiration date of”—he checks—“thirty years.”

Something about this troubles Mona. “Thirty years from Earl’s death?”

“Erm, no,” says the official. He checks the papers. “This would be thirty years from the date of your mother’s death.”

Mona closes her eyes, and thinks—
fuck
.

“What?” says the official. “Something wrong?”

“Yeah,” says Mona. “That means it expires in”—she does some math in her head—“eleven days.”

“Oh.” The official whistles lowly. “Well. Better get a wiggle on, I suppose.”

Mona gives him a prime
no shit
glare, then squints to read the home’s address:

1929
LARCHMONT

WINK, NM
87207

Mona frowns.

Wink? she thinks. Where the fuck is Wink?

The question stays on her mind as she drives into Big Spring to track down her father’s storage unit. It even pushes out all thoughts of the Charger. She has never felt there was much to know about her father—and what else was there besides the bitter silences, the smell of cordite, and the Silver Bullet tallboy clutched in one hairy fist?—yet now she is given to wonder. If all this is true, if her mother really did leave him a house in a distant town, then he must have known at least a little about it—right? You don’t just inherit a house and then stick all knowledge of it away and forget about it, do you?

It strikes her as she pulls into the storage center that if anyone would ever do such a thing, it would be her daddy. He was just the type.

The storage center attendant is initially suspicious of her. Not just because she’s asking to open someone else’s unit, and has to produce a lot of documents and fumble with a lot of keys to prove her case, but also because that particular unit hasn’t been opened in over two years. Finally he gives in—though Mona suspects his objection was mostly fueled by a reluctance to get out of his chair rather than some professional
honor—and he leads her through the maze of boxes and metal doors to one of the larger storage units at the far back.

“Is he dead for reals?” asks the attendant.

“He is for reals dead,” says Mona. “I’ve seen him.”

“If that’s the case, you got a week to clear all this out, just so’s you know,” he says, and he unlocks the unit and sends the door rattling up.

Mona’s eyes spring wide. The court officer described the storage unit as having “several” of his belongings, and she also recalls the term “a fair few” being used. But what confronts her in the storage unit is such an imposing pile of tottering shit that she is almost faint with the idea of sorting it. It’ll take her twelve days at least to get a quarter of the way through it.

She gets a hefty Maglite from the storage clerk and a dolly to wheel some of this stuff away. She is thankful to have driven her old truck here, as it will definitely come in handy. But it does not take long for her to spot a shape on the side of the unit, something long, with sleek angles, draped in a thick tarp. She spies a tire peeking from underneath one fold, and her heart leaps.

It takes her more than a half an hour to get all the boxes off it, but soon the powerful form of the Charger emerges from the beige clutter. When she has enough cleared she rips the tarp off, and a cloud of dust rushes up and balloons out to fill the unit and most of the pathway outside. It is so thick it cakes her sunglasses. She waits for it to settle before she removes them, leaving flesh-colored holes in her now-dusty face.

She blinks. The Charger stands before her. She has not seen this car in fifteen years, and yet it has not aged a day. It is as if it has just fallen out of a memory. Not even the dust can taint its vibrant red color, which seems to fill the unit with a merry glow.

She moves to touch it, wishing to confirm that this moment is indeed happening, when her toe catches one of the cardboard boxes and sends her tumbling over. She falls so fast she does not even have time to cry out or try to stop herself, and the cement floor flies up and cracks her on the forehead.

It is a solid hit, and for a moment she sees nothing but green bubbles of light bursting in a sea of black. Then one light begins to grow steadier, and she hears the Maglite clattering on the floor nearby. Forms calcify in the darkness, blank gray faces all stacked in a column, and on one of the faces is a word:
LAURA
.

She realizes she is lying on the dusty floor with her cheek on the cement and her feet up on a crushed box. The Maglite is caught in the tarp and shooting a spotlight on one box in a tower of them. But it is the box below it, the one with the word
LAURA
written on it in Sharpie, that Mona is most interested in. That, and the state of her head.

She sits up and touches her brow. There is a leak of blood forming there, and her fingers shine wetly. “Fuck,” she says, and looks around for something to stanch it. Seeing nothing useful, she tears off a corner of dust-covered newspaper and slaps it to her head. It sticks.

She has entirely forgotten the Charger behind her. She removes the boxes on top of the
LAURA
one, and pulls the lid off.

She blinks again. Her head is beginning to pound and everything feels woozy. It is hard to see into the box in the dark. She grabs the Maglite and shines it in.

It’s all papers, like the rest of the storage unit. But these are not papers she thinks her daddy would ever normally have. They are too official, too… technical. She sees the initials
CNLO
in a lot of the corners, next to some kind of corporate logo, and some of them are copies of graph paper with a lot of numbers and equations on them.

Then Mona spies something at the edge of the box. It is a glossy corner of a photo, she is sure. She pulls it out and examines it.

It is a photo of four women on a back porch, seated around a wrought-iron table. They are all well dressed and holding up cocktails and laughing at the camera, which, judging by the hazy shadows and soft colors, was some kind of old Polaroid. Behind the women is an impressive vista: there are tall pines mere yards away, and behind those is a wall of immense pink crags, striated with dusky crimson.

Mona does not know three of the women. But the fourth she recognizes,
though never in her life did she see that face in a look of such happiness. For Mona that face was always fearful and sad, the eyes constantly probing the room as if expecting to spy some invisible intruder. But the person in the picture is definitely her mother, decades younger than when Mona knew her, perhaps lives younger, free of years of illness and sour marriage.

Mona turns the picture over. On the back, written in loopy blue ballpoint, are the words:
MOUNTAINS ARE PINK—TIME TO DRINK!