American Elsewhere (6 page)

Mona is enjoying herself so much that she almost forgets to start checking the road signs. When she finally does she sees that she is much closer to her general target than she expected. She begins to pull over at little stops to ask if the people there have ever heard of Wink.

At first, not many have. They stare at her uncertainly, and after
they say no they ask if she wants something else, as if she should buy a gallon of gas or a soda just out of politeness. But Mona has neither money nor politeness to spare, and she hops back in her car and speeds along to the next stop.

Yet then the name produces a reaction: they stare at her, puzzled, but direct her down the road (this instruction is needless—there is only one road) and tell her to keep an eye out for a well-paved road leading north.

One woman tells her, “Odd that you’re going there. Can’t remember the last time someone went there. Come to think of it, can’t remember the last time someone came from there, either.”

If Mona’s lucky, she’ll make it before nightfall. Then she’ll have a whole week to try to get the house. She hopes that will be enough.

Mona finds the paved road very easily. It is impossible to miss, so smooth and unbroken and black. It is easily the nicest road she’s seen in a while. It winds down the mountain slope into fuller and taller pines, away from the rocky heights of the plateaus. It becomes rather shocking how far the road keeps going down; she wonders if this town, if it’s still around, exists at the bottom of a hole in the ground. But then there is a break in the trees, and she sees it is not quite a hole but rather a steep, narrow valley.

When the road reaches the bottom of the valley it curls around itself, toward the mesa. A large, painted sign stands on the right-hand side of the turn. Mona slows to a stop to look at it.

The sign must mark the southern entrance to Wink, she thinks. It is large and colorful, and depicts two men and a woman standing at the mouth of a valley, staring at a sun-dappled mesa before them. All of them, Mona notes, are exceedingly white. The men have their hands on their hips (very authoritative), while the woman has her hands clasped together below her breasts. The men have smooth, parted hair, virtually the same except that one’s is blond and the other’s is brown, as if they’re different versions of the same doll. They wear khakis and plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up, as if there’s work to do and darn it, they plan to do it. The woman has long, curly blond
locks and a bright white-and-red sundress. They look like the kind of adults all children expect to be when they grow up.

But it is what they are gazing at that Mona finds odd. There is something on top of the mesa at the end of the valley. It looks like a tiny bronze antenna, like the kind that used to sit on top of the world in the old RKO Pictures logo. It is such an antiquated addition to the picture, yet there is something else strange about it. Are there streaks in the sky all pointing to the antenna? They look almost like very faint bolts of lightning.

At the bottom, the sign reads:
WELCOME TO WINK—WHERE THE SKY TOUCHES THE EARTH!
Below that, in much smaller writing:
POP.: 1,243
.

Mona realizes that the valley looks familiar. She gets out of her car, steps back, and looks around.

After a while she realizes it is
this
valley, and the mesa in the sign is the one just ahead of her, yet the trees have grown so tall that they obscure nearly everything below it. She can see no antenna on it. Perhaps there are buildings, but it is hard to see from so far away…

She finds the sign puts a bad taste in her mouth. She climbs back into the Charger and starts off down the road again, happy to leave it behind.

A twist of dark road, a leaning fence, the grasping brush of a soft pine branch. On and on and on the road goes… Mona feels sure she’s driven the length of the whole valley, but there’s always more, as if the landscape is unfolding as she travels.

Then she spots something pink out of the corner of her eye, something bulbous and smooth gliding through the air. She can see it only through the gaps in the trees. There is writing on one side, though she can see just two letters:
WI
.

She sees it is not flying, but standing on a tall, round post. A water tower, she thinks. But she didn’t see any tower before, and she definitely should have…

As she ponders this a splash of red comes swooping out from
between the pines: a stop sign. Startled, she comes to an abrupt stop, and discovers she has arrived.

She’s at an intersection, but it’s completely different from those of the rough country roads she’s been traveling: on her left is a small white wooden house with green trim, and on her right is another house, this one of adobe, the walls and corners smooth and brown like a sculpted chocolate cake. Each one expands back into the uneven terrain, disappearing behind thick beds of flowers. The change is so sudden that for a moment Mona sits and stares around, confused.

She realizes she has entered the street grid of Wink. She sees small shops ahead, and telephone wires, and tall pines in the parks. And yet there is no one on the streets that she can see, nor is there any sound at all besides the wind.

This is the town on the federal enclave?
she wonders. She saw no signs warding trespassers away, or border guards; the only thing that hindered her arrival was the downward incline of the road.

She starts off into the streets. It is nearly evening, and the first thing she plans to do is ask someone where a motel is. She’ll tackle the issue of her mother’s house in the morning. So long as she presents her identification to the right people tomorrow, the house should be hers.

But she finds no one to ask. As she roves through the street grid (each block is nearly perfect—if she took out a protractor and measured the corners, she is sure they would be at an even ninety degrees) she does not spot a single soul. Every street and every shop and every home is deserted. There aren’t even any cars parked in the lots.

This is why Wink wasn’t on any maps
, she thinks.
No one fucking lives here anymore.
It is just her luck to inherit a house in a ghost town.

But it can’t be abandoned, not really, she decides. It is too well maintained for that: the neon lights of the diner, though unlit, look functional; the cafés all have (somewhat) fresh coats of paint; and as the sun sets the streetlamps all flicker on, bathing the streets in a white, phosphorescent glow, and none of the bulbs are out.

But though it is deserted, the town is quaintly beautiful. Many of the shops and buildings have a faint Googie influence to them, which
contrasts hugely with the New Mexican stylings: standing beside a smooth, earthy adobe home might be a metal porthole window and an angular, upswept roof, or an amalgam of glass and steel and neon. Both the diner and the café have parabola-shaped signs done in soft, Easter-egg blue. It feels inappropriate to be cruising these streets in the Charger. What she needs is an Eldorado with tail fins and rocket-ship taillights. Or, she thinks as she passes a round-walled adobe house with pine corbels, maybe a horse-drawn wagon. It is a strangely schizophrenic place, but not unwelcoming.

She tries to imagine her mother living here. Maybe she went to that diner, bought flowers from this shop on the corner, walked her dog down that sidewalk.
Jesus
, Mona thinks—
could she have had a dog?
For some reason, this fairly irrelevant possibility confounds her.

Then Mona turns one corner, and she sees the street ahead is lined with parked cars. They are not, as she expected, vintage cars, but Chevy trucks and the like. She speeds up a little, wondering if this could be something, and as she does a wrought-iron railing emerges from the bushes along the sidewalk, and at the next corner is a white wooden church with a tall steeple.

When she pulls up alongside the fence she finally sees what is on the other side, and she slams on the brakes in surprise. The tires squeal a little as she comes to a halt.

Just on the other side of the wrought-iron fence is a huge crowd of people, hundreds of them.

When her tires squeal they all jump, turn, and look at her.

Mona looks back, and sees they are all wearing black, or at least dark gray, and some of the women’s faces are veiled.

The yard with the wrought-iron fence, she realizes, is a graveyard. And at the center of the crowd is a lacquered casket hanging over an open grave.

Wink is not deserted: everyone is attending a funeral. Which Mona has just interrupted, in her rumbling muscle car with squealing tires.

“Ah, shit,” says Mona.

For a moment she has no idea what to do. Then, haltingly, she
waves. Most of the people do nothing. Then a small boy, about seven, smiles and waves back.

An older man in a black suit says something to the woman beside him, and walks to the iron fence. Mona rolls down the passenger window, and he asks, “Can I help you?”

Mona clears her throat. “I-is there a motel around here?”

The man stares blankly at her. But not, she feels, in shock or reproach: it is as if his face can make no other expression. Then, without taking his eyes off her, he raises one arm and points down the road ahead. “On the left,” he says, slowly but clearly.

“Thanks,” says Mona. “I’m real sorry for interrupting everything.”

The man does not respond. He stays stock-still for a couple of seconds. Then he lowers his arm. The rest of the crowd keeps watching her.

“Sorry,” she says again. “Real sorry.” She rolls up the window and drives away, but when she looks in the rearview mirror they are all still watching her.

There are probably worse first impressions, but right now Mona cannot think of any. She’s come from one awkward, unhappy funeral to another. She wonders what they will think when they hear she’s inherited a house in town.

Her face is still bright red when she finds the motel, a low, long, dark building at the edge of town. The motel sign reads
PONDEROSA ACRES
in orange neon, and below that, in smaller red letters, is the word
VACANCY
. It looks a little like a cabin, with walls made of—or made to look like they’re made of—huge pine logs. There are no lights on in any of the rooms except the office.

She gets out and scans the parking lot. There are no other cars here, not even any on the street.

She walks into the office with her bag over her shoulder. The office is surprisingly spacious, with green marble floors and wood-paneled walls. It smells of beeswax and dust and popcorn. There is only one light in the room, a yellow ceiling lamp that casts a spotlight on a
small desk in the corner, littered with papers. In the corner she can just make out an old yellow sofa. Keys glint on the wall behind the desk, and somewhere a handheld radio tinnily plays “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Besides that corner, the office is oppressively dark. She can barely make out a dead palm in a pot before the desk. Its curling brown leaves are still scattered on the floor. On the wall is an old calendar turned to the wrong month; it is brown with age and unmarked, the tool of someone who has had nothing to do for a long, long time.

The office appears to be empty. “Damn it,” she says, and wonders where she will go now.

“Can I help you?” asks a deep, soft voice.

Mona turns around, looking for the speaker. The room is so dark that it takes her eyes a moment to adjust. Then she sees there is a card table in the corner of the room beside the door, and seated at it is an old man with a board of Chinese checkers in front of him. He is bald and gray-bearded, and his pock-marked skin is so dark that initially his gray beard appears to simply float in the darkness. In one of his hands is a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee. He wears a gray zip-up sweater, red-and-black-striped pants, and alligator shoes, and he watches her over a pair of half-moon spectacles with calm, reserved eyes.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t see you there.”

The old man sips his coffee but says nothing, as if to mean—
Obviously
.

“I’d like to rent a room, please, sir. Just for tonight.”

The old man looks away, thinking. After nearly a full thirty seconds of meditation, with nothing but Hank Williams to break the silence, he says: “Here?”

“What?”

“You want to get a room here?”

“What? Yes. Yeah, I want to get a room here.”

The old man grunts, stands up, and goes to the keys on the wall. There are about twenty hanging there on the corkboard. He surveys them very carefully, as if searching a bookshelf for the appropriate tome, and with a quiet
aha!
he selects one from the bottom corner of the board. What marks this key as different from any of the others,
Mona cannot tell. Then he lifts it to his lips and blows. A significant cloud of dust flies up from the key to dance around the ceiling lamp.

“Been a while since you guys had customers?” asks Mona.

“It has been a very long while,” says the old man. He smiles and holds the key out to her.

Mona reaches for it. “How much?”

“How much?” He pulls the key back, confused. “For what?”

“For… the room?”

“Oh,” says the old man, a little irritated, as if this were a needless formality he’d forgotten. He lowers the key, grunts again, puts his cup of coffee down, and begins to sort through the papers on his desk. As he does, he notices the dead plant on the floor. He stops and leans forward, examining it. Then he looks up at Mona and sternly says, “My plant has died.”

“I’m… real sorry to hear that.”

“It was a very old plant.”

He seems to be waiting for her to say something. She ventures, “Oh?”

“Yes. I had it for nearly a year. It was my favorite plant, because of this.”

“Well. That’s understandable.”

The old man just looks at her.

She adds, “You get attached to things if they’re around long enough.”

He keeps staring at her. Mona is beginning to feel quite disturbed. She wonders if he is senile, but there is more to it than that: it feels very unsafe in this big, dark office, where only one corner is lit and tangible, and the rest is hidden from her. For some reason she gets the sense that they are not alone. When the old man returns to his papers, Mona checks the corners—still nothing. Maybe it’s just a weird feeling she got from seeing that funeral.