Authors: BRET LOTT
“Don’t mean what? ” Eudine cut in. “What y’all keeping to yourselves over there, huh? ” But she wasn’t really interested, I could see, she reached into the back seat of our car, took hold of Brenda Kay’s hand.
“Come on out here, baby-doll, ” she said, and slowly Brenda Kay moved toward her, a smile starting to come.
“How’s them legs of yours? ” Eudine said, and knelt as best she could, hugged Brenda Kay still sitting on the seat, her legs dangling out the door. “How you doing, baby? ” she said.
“You fat! ” she hollered, and Eudine laughed that loud laugh of hers.
“You’re telling me, sweetheart! ” Eudine laughed, then climbed into the car next to Brenda Kay, pulling Annie on in with her, the three of them taking up the back seat of the Plymouth. “And y’all got yourselves a brand-new car to boot, ” she said, ran her hand along the top of the seat in front of her.
I kept an eye on Brenda Kay to see how she’d be around Eudine. But instead her eyes were on me, and on the child in my arms, and I realized it was Judy and me she was most interested in, my attention and love suddenly given, she must’ve thought, to someone else. Not to her.
“Daddy! ” Judy cried out, and started to fidgeting in my arms, and I let her go, watched as she ran to her daddy, my son James, who picked her up and swung her round like a sack of flour, set her on top of his shoulders.
I turned back to the car, saw Brenda Kay looking at me. She eased back in the seat, comforted, I was certain, by Judy being gone, and started watching Eudine talk on and on at her about how much food was going to be over to her Aunt Charity’s, how she was barbequing up Texas steaks and roast corn and cutting up fresh cantaloupe from down by the Pecos.
Brenda Kay just kept blinking, not certain who this was, why she was here.
Finally, the men came to the car, and James said, “Now y’all just follow me. Wilman and Judy’ll go with me, and then we can visit for real.”
Judy, still on his shoulders, had hold a hank of his hair, pulled at it like it was a set of reins in her hands.
Leston nodded, and James pulled Judy from her perch up there, set her on the ground. Then he put out his hand, held it for his father to take.
Leston took it, and the two shook, but it was what happened after that that made me swell and smile, made the dirt and travel and sweat so far worthwhile, they finished shaking hands, but for a moment or two they only stood there, looking at each other, holding hands firm and hard, but holding hands.
A heavy gust of prairie wind barreled through the parking lot, shook the car, the sound of grit against the side of the car the only sound around us, even Eudine quiet for a second.
But then she broke it, yelled, “Now let’s get on out of here. There’s steaks the size of this car to be eaten, ” and we were gone, headed for a trailer somewhere in the town of Big Spring, Texas.
We ate too much, then spent the night in Aunt Charity’s trailer, all nine of us covering every bit of floor space she had and using up every blanket and sheet and towel before we were out of there. Our leaving the next morning was filled with kisses and crying and fussing over when we might see each other again, filled, too, with the deep and shiny ache I carried in my heart when I’d had to surrender baby Judy back to her own momma. There was a certain wonder in the fact of a normal child, I came to see with the weight of one back in my arms, a wonder in all they could prove out to be, the world set before each and every one of them like a fine table set for a feast. And here was baby Judy, ready and raring to go out into the world as she squirmed to get free from her momma’s arms once we were in our car and backing away from the trailer.
Eudine finally let my first grandchild down, and no sooner than Judy’s feet touched dirt did she tear off around the side of the trailer, and disappear.
Eudine shrugged and made a face at me, and I smiled, waved again, that ache grown even bigger in just that moment, when I’d not been able to wave good-bye to Judy.
Leston put the car in gear, and we were gone.
Before we were out of Big Spring and back on the desert, I made Leston stop at a hardware store, had Wilman go in and buy a galvanized bucket, then fill it with ice cubes at the service station we gassed up at. I sat with the bucket on the floorboard between my legs, passing out cubes to whoever wanted one and soaking down one of Wilman’s Tshirts the last clean one he had and passing that around, too, each of us given five minutes with it wrapped round our necks until I had to soak it down again, pass it on to the next person.
The next night we’d stayed in El Paso, Wilman pestering us to head over to Juarez for a bullfight, but James having warned us off that for fear we’d end up knifed and robbed, the next night we’d spent in Demming, New Mexico. We hadn’t got near as far as we’d intended for the car overheating once we were up into the mountains and off the flat of Texas. But we’d managed to limp into Demming, Leston knowing even before the Plymouth dealer in town did it was the thermostat needed replacing.
We bought cowboy boots for Leston and Wilman and even Annie while we waited, then found a motel and spent the night, got up early the next morning and started across Arizona, made it to Phoenix by dark. By that time the hot, dry air had been with us for a few days, and I could feel my lips going chapped, kept us all salved up with a tube of Chapstick I’,‘d bought back in El Paso.
Then had come the next to last leg, us crossing over the green Colorado at midday, stopped at the California side for a fruit inspection, then sent on to Blythe where we filled up the tank and the bucket both.
Then a hundred miles of nothing, only desert, then those mountains, the sand hills, and the Desert Moon Inn.
Wilman settled the suitcase into the trunk, pushed it back aways to make room for the other four, all the worldly goods we had left, but there was joy I took in traveling this light, everything shucked for now.
Wilman went back inside, the Plymouth parked right in front of our room of the low, flat motel. The sign for the place script letters way up high spelling out Desert Moon Inn in flashing blue neon, a lit white bulb the size of a basketball dotting the I was what brought us in from Highway 10 yesterday evening, hot and tired and so worked up about finally being in California we didn’t notice how close the place was to the train tracks. After a supper that cost us twice what the same in Mississippi would have, we drove back and forth on the main street, a four-lane road lined with huge date palm trees that swayed in the late evening breeze beneath a sky that seemed impossibly huge and littered with brand-new stars, then pulled around to the back of a Texaco station so that Wilman could throw up the date milkshake he’d finished off his meal with Indio was the date capital of the world, our waitress had told us. Then we spent the night listening to freight trains, the whole room trembling with the slow weight of the cars as they edged through town, the whole room lit on and off with blue neon coming in through the thin curtains. None of us slept, except for Brenda Kay, no bandages on her legs now, no wraps. Only the red and scarred skin that would always be red and scarred. She was the only one to sleep, the four of us Leston, me, Wilman and Annie only turning and turning.
Inside the room Leston was shaving at the sink. Annie, in the seersucker skirt, leaned at the mirror above the dresser, penciling at her eyebrows, her hair still in the rag-curls she’d put in last night, her cheeks rouged up, her eyelids a pale blue. Brenda Kay was still asleep on the bed, wrapped in the sheet and curled up tight.
“Annie, don’t you think you’re overdoing this a bit? ” I said, and stood behind her, looked in the mirror at her.
She stopped with the pencil, glared up at me.
She said, “I guess you don’t realize what we’re doing today, do you? ” She looked at me a moment longer, started up with the pencil again.
“I know, ” I said, “that you’re my daughter, always will be, and I know that fact won’t ever give you the right to talk to me that way, young girl.” I tried to force my eyes to go hard on her, tried to grit my teeth in a way she might fear and respect. But that didn’t happen, I couldn’t do anything other than smile at her, here in a cheap motel in Indio, California, date capital of the world, my daughter getting dolled up in the hopes some Hollywood director would spot her as we rolled into town.
“Yes, Momma, ” she sighed out, then put down the pencil, started taking out the rags. “I’m sorry, Momma, ” she said in her teenage way, the words only enough to get me off her back. She wouldn’t look at me, only at the mirror, and suddenly she stopped, leaned even closer to the glass. “Look at the bags under my eyes! ” she yelled.
Leston said, “The last two suitcases are for you to put in the car, Anne, ” and tapped his razor.
We ate breakfast at the same diner we’d eaten at the night before, served by a waitress might as well have been the same one we’d had last night except for her too-blonde hair, then we gassed up at the Texaco station Wilman’d thrown up at last night. Before we headed out, Leston asked the attendant if we could borrow the hose Lying next to the restroom doors at the side of the place, and the man’d shrugged, said okay. Wilman got out, showered the car with water to wash off as much road dirt as possible. Brenda Kay clapped in the back seat as Wilman sprayed the rear window, while Annie, her chin in hand, sat shaking her head at all us white crackers. By eightfifteen we were out on Highway 10, headed for Los Angeles in our clean and brand-new car.
Mountains surrounded us for a long while, rocky mountains that jutted up on either side of the flat desert floor, nothing but brush and rock leading away from the road and toward those peaks. We drove past a sign that said Palm Springs, and Annie near-pitched a fit in the back seat, screaming on and on about how that town was Hollywood’s desert playground, where everybody came to sit in the sun after working hard on their movies. We passed through a couple Jr’ WL of towns, Beaumont and Banning, the reasons they even existed there in the desert I couldn’t see, after a while we started coming into farm country, on either side of the road green rows of lettuce and tomatoes and summer squash skimming past like spokes on a wheel as we drove.
Finally the mountains beside us seemed to part, those on our left peeling back and south, those to the right retreating aways, and we came to a rise in the road.
Leston slowed down on the highway, pulled to the shoulder, and we stopped.
I leaned forward, a hand to the dashboard, and looked out the windshield.
It was a flat valley we were heading into, huge and wide, but green as far as you could see, a flat green with few trees. This was California, as much like glory land as anything I’d ever hope to see.
California.
Leston had a hand on the steering wheel, with the other took the cigarette from his lips, hung it out the window.
“She’s pretty, ” he said, his eyes squinted at the light, at all the light the sun above us gave off. Though it was still in the nineties, and though the bucket of ice on the floorboard was half-melted, sloshed back and forth with each bump in the road, somehow the heat didn’t matter, and the struggle it was to keep my eyes from squinting closed at the light didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, because here we were.
Cars shot past us, and I looked to the back seat, saw the faces of my three children staring at the view, even Brenda Kay looking, taking it in and making of it whatever her mind made of things brand-new and foreign to her, her having no way to know she was gazing down on a place where she’d be helped beyond measure, where we’d come closer, God willing or not, to fixing this life.
Leston leaned his head out the window, looked behind him. He gave it the gas, and we were back on the blacktop, rolling down to our salvation, and I got out the brochures I’d gotten from the National Association for Retarded Children, unfolded them, careful not to rip them, pieces of worn and soft paper three years old, and I read them out loud again for the fiftieth time this trip.
An hour later we were still in farm country, only now there were more cars, more intersections, more stoplights and stores and service stations and homes coming in closer to the road. Now and again, too, we’d pass a dairy farm, the smell on this August afternoon swallowing us up. Then we’d be back in the middle of cabbage fields or more tomatoes, the smell as welcome and comfortable as any Mississippi afternoon, only better, the air still dry and hot.
We passed through towns with strange names, all the while making certain to stay right on Highway 10, just as Burton’d instructed. We passed through a town called Redlands, then Bloomington, passed signs pointing to places called Fontana and Rialto, Ontario and Montclair, all of it farmland and farmland.
Then the road was bordered on both sides by rows of low, thick green trees, branches heavy with pale green fruit.
“They look like limes, ” Wilman said from the back seat, and I said, “They’re too big.”
“Oranges, ” Leston said.
“That’s oranges? ” Annie said from behind me. She sat up, her face out the window. “That’s oranges? ” “Looks like, ” Leston said. “This is California, you know.”
“Oranges, ” she said.
“Ohnge, ” I heard from Brenda Kay, and I turned, saw her peering out the window right alongside her sister.
“Y’all sit back, ” I said, “just sit back and hold tight. We’ll be there soon enough.”
“Look at that, ” Leston said, and I turned to see us pass a green sign, ENTERING LOS ANGELES COUNTY in white letters across it, and I heard Annie and Wilman holler and clap in the back seat, Brenda Kay starting in with her Huh huhs, and I could do nothing but shake my head, call out a time or two more for them to settle down, Leston grinning all the while.
The farmland started giving out, fewer and fewer strawberry fields and broccoli and lettuce, all of it turned over to houses, stores, streetlights and more streetlights. We were passing through more towns, too, Covina, West Covina, Baldwin Park, low buildings coming up now, cars swarming up round us when we came to intersections. Yet there wasn’t anywheres on the map Burton’d sent us any indication we were getting very close to where he would meet us, Bundy Mufflers at the corner of Olympic Boulevard and Bundy Avenue. Now and again, too, we were getting honked at, cars pulling right up behind us and near tapping the bumper back there, and suddenly I’d seen that our car wasn’t much to shout about in the middle of all these cars, we were just another of a thousand brand-new 52 Plymouths on the road, only we had Mississippi plates on. There was nothing special about our car.