We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, which has become Scenic Road 333 instead of Ro>We drive the old route toward Albuquerque, wute 66. It is a gnarled, narrow road that lowers us into Tijeras Canyon, pulls us out, and then lowers us again. The walls of the canyon rise from the road, ridged and crenellated, covered with a burnt layer of brush. Everything looks weathered, shriveled, half-dead. It reminds me that we’re only a couple hundred miles from Alamogordo, where they tested the first A-bomb. It looks like it.
I know only too well about the effects of radiation, the barrenness it causes, all the good it’s supposed to do while it destroys. I have watched too many friends and relations wither and die, not from their disease, but from this alleged cure for their disease. That’s why I told Dr. Tom and all the rest of them that there no way they were going to use that stuff on me. The kids were all gung ho about aggressive treatment, but I told them: no radiation, no chemo, no nothing. The doctors seemed actually relieved. They don’t like using most of that stuff on old people, anyway. Of course, they don’t want you to go out and enjoy yourself, either. They just want you to rot in some hospital somewhere, while they do their tests on you and do everything humanly possible to keep you alive and uncomfortable for as long as possible; then when they feel like they’ve done everything they can, they send you home to die. I suppose they think that’s the best place to die. It probably is, for most people.
I decide we need some distraction. “John, let’s drive around Albuquerque a little bit, see what’s here. What do you say?”
“All right with me.”
We follow the business loop into the old section of town, where we have a gander at the Pueblo architecture, the old KiMo and El Rey movie theaters, and some crazy murals that look like they were painted by someone with a large supply of discomfort medication. Oh, and you better believe that there’s another Route 66 Diner. Gee, maybe there’s posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean in there.
We climb Nine Mile Hill and in my rearview mirror, I watch Albuquerque diminish. We take the Old Town Bridge over the Rio Grande. The water below is dark and filthy. Down the road, I see a loose-planked white house with a Polack blue roof. On the side of the house, in block letters, it says:
L-A TRUCKERS CHURCH
ALLELUJA HE IS RISEN
SMOKE FREE BINGO
TUES 6:30
Good to know, I think.
We find a decent campground near a town called Grants. I’m happy to be settled in for the night, happy that our part of the campground is deserted. I’ve had enough of humanity to last me for a while.
John is suddenly perky, so he sets up the canopy and even drags a picnic table over for me to cook on. Once he turns the
place into a proper campsite, I start to relax. It’s a lovely afternoon, the air cooling down nicely.
Afterward, John plops down into one of our old aluminum lawn chairs with the frayed green-and-white webbing. (We bought them at the same time we got the Leisure Seeker thirty years ago, so I keep wondering when he’s going to bust right through one of them.) He’s reading that Louis L’Amour book again, though I haven’t seen him turn a page yet. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him holding it upside down sometime.
I set up the electric pan out on the picnic table and start frying bologna. I’m not really in the mood for it and I guarantee you that I shouldn’t be eating it, but I went through our little fridge and noticed that it was starting to turn. I’d hate for it to go bad, so it’s going to be dinner.
I split the edges of the slices so they don’t curl much, but once I put them on the frying pan, I don’t pay as much attention as I should and the pieces blacken on one side before I remember to flip them. I flop them onto some paper towel to drain the grease. Then I put them between slices of stale Wonder bread, slather on mustard, and serve it with the remains of an old bag of chips and some tepid pickles. All I can say for this meal is that it is quite thoroughly stale. Well done, Ella.
Yet when we sit down at the table, John is thrilled. He gobbles up his sandwich in a matter of minutes, then the other half of mine. I mix myself a manhattan, park myself next to him, take his hand, and we watch the sun set without saying a word.
Once it’s dark, the campground gets so damn quiet, I don’t know what to do with myself. At the table, John has dozed off next to me. “John, wake up,” I say. “You’re not going to be able to sleep tonight.”
He lifts his head, stares crossly at me. “What?”
“Come on. We’re going to watch slides.”
“It’s too late.” He starts to doze again.
I poke him in the shoulder. “Come on. It’s just past eight. If we go to bed now, we’ll be up at three in the morning. Get out the projector.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“I’ll show you. Put it on the picnic table and then we’ll have ice cream.”
“All right.” He lumbers up from the bench.
Food. It always works.
Tonight the pictures that we project on the side of our trailer are of our children, whom I miss so much, whom I’ve missed since they started leaving our home decades ago. Although we never exactly intended to do it, we have a tray of slides culled from other trays, a mishmash, entirely of the kids. It allows us to watch our children grow up in the space of about ten minutes, though not necessarily in the correct order. It’s like the Greatest Hits of the Robinas.
We see our children swimming at a beach, with birthday
cake smeared on their faces, lying thrilled in piles of fallen leaves, standing stiffly in front of mantels with prom dates, sitting on docks at sunset, staring up at the stone white faces of Mount Rushmore, on the knees of florid Santa Clauses, hugging Mickey Mouse, coming home sunburned and peeling from their very own first vacations without us.
“That’s a cute one of Cindy!” John says, shoveling the last spoonful of melted ice cream into his mouth. “She’s a little doll.” It’s a slide of her dressed as a hula girl when she was about twelve. The picture, reddened with age, has made her look older than she really was at the time.
Another shot is of Kevin, barely four, on the same Halloween. He’s dressed as a little Indian, with his face painted and a feathered headdress. It’s strange to see this here in New Mexico, not far from the Indian reservation.
“Kevin and I got that costume over at Checker’s,” says John.
I look over at John, amazed. I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering. Checker Drugs was a place in our old neighborhood where we went for bread and milk and the occasional vanilla phosphate. I just don’t understand why he’s able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes
of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather—all the things so unimportant that they should be immediately forgotten.
Yet they aren’t. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie’s feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around an aluminum pot the moment before all the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be?
You want to think there’s a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we’re here, but there really isn’t any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don’t know where else to look. Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I’ll be damned if I know.
The next slide is Kevin at the Autorama, holding a small trophy and a model car that he had entered in a contest. He won third place. I’m sure he still remembers this day. All I remember is being relieved when we left.
I touch the projector button and the next slide is nothing. There is no next slide, only the very bright light that occurs when the tray slot is empty. I look over at John and he’s back
in his lawn chair, slumped over asleep. I say his name, but he snorts and goes right back to sleep. He won’t be able to move tomorrow. He’ll bitch about how sore he is, and then he’ll bitch about it again five minutes later.
I hear a noise down the road. It’s probably just a little critter, but I start to get scared. Maybe it’s a coyote or a wolf. I remember that we are in the campground pretty much by ourselves, that I haven’t seen a manager or another person for hours. I decide to get my purse out of the van. I wouldn’t mind having that gun nearby. I start to get up, when I hear a noise again—a scrabbling in what is probably a trash can.
“John, wake up!” I yell, determined to head for the van. I grab my cane and try to lift myself up from the picnic table bench, but I’ve been sitting for too long. My legs are stiff and I can barely feel them. I have to dangle them from the bench to get the blood stirring again. Meanwhile, the fan from the projector is still whirring away, the light blazing. You’re not supposed to leave the light on for this long without slides, but I’m not going to turn it off and be left in the dark.
“John!”
“Who is it?” says John, rattled.
“It’s
Ella,
” I say. “There’s a noise up the way.” I try my legs and can feel them a little now. I raise myself again, using both hands on the bench of the picnic table. I leave my cane just standing there. I manage to lift myself, but as I reach for my cane, my legs simply fold beneath me. I go down slowly, my knees hit the ground, then my hands, then I topple over onto
my side into the hard dirt. I’ve scraped my hands, my knees are on fire, and my one leg is bent back slightly. I pray it’s not broken.
“John!” I yell to him. “I fell!”
“What?”
I’m trying hard not to panic. “I’m on the ground! I
fell,
John! Help me up!”
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” John says, as if annoyed. But before I know it, I see the shadow of him above me.
“Take my hand. Take my hand.”
“John, you can’t lift me up. I weigh too much. You’ll fall, too.”
“Yes, I can. Just take my hand.”
So I take John’s hand while he holds on to the picnic table and tries to lift me. He gets me about a foot up from the ground, so I’m able to straighten out my leg before his grip on the table gives out and he comes tumbling forward.
Oh God no,
I think, as his thick, lumbering form towers toward me. I cannot believe this is happening.
“Ahhhhk,” yells John. “I—”
I fall back again, but now with John on top of me. This time, it’s not a slow, soft fall. It hurts much worse with John’s weight on me. Stones bite into my rear end, my head hits the dirt, my insides hurt. I feel the entire mass of his body on me. I can’t breathe. I feel more discomfort than I can even describe. Tears push themselves from the corners of my eyes. The first words out of my mouth ache my lungs. “God
damn
it.”
John just lies there without doing anything. I can’t move with him on top of me. “John, get off me!” I manage to say, almost breathless.
“I think I hurt my arm,” he says.
“I don’t care. You can’t keep lying on top of me. Get off.” He stays like a dead weight at first, then I feel his legs start to stir. “John, you’re crushing me. Get
off
.”
Finally, John sniffs, takes a long, rusty breath, manages to lift himself up and roll over next to me. His arm seems to be all right.
Now at least, I can breathe again. I look over at him. His eyes are crazy and scared. Lord, this is a big mess we’re in now, I’m afraid.
My leg feels okay now. It hurts, but I don’t think it’s broken.
“John. Are you all right?”
He looks at me as if trying to recognize me, then finally he says, “What are you doing down here?”
“John. I fell, remember? You tried to help me up and you fell. We’re camping. We’re in New Mexico.”
“Mexico?”
“
New
Mexico. You fell asleep while we were watching slides. Now we’re stuck on the ground.”
“Oh, shit,” he says.
Even he realizes that we’re in trouble. I start to scoot toward the van, still thinking about my purse. Stones dig into my hands as I lift myself from the ground just enough to move inch by inch. I can’t believe how filthy I’m getting. My slacks
are going to be ruined. But I guess that won’t matter if I can’t ever get up from the ground.
After a foot or two, I’m not so sure the purse is going to help any. I could shoot the gun until someone shows up, but there’s no guarantee that will happen. Besides, I’m afraid to shoot the gun in the air. Back in Detroit, people are always shooting guns into the sky on New Year’s Eve and someone always gets hurt. A bullet crashing through the roof, hitting some poor child lying in bed or someone sitting in their living room watching Dick Clark.
Of course, the cell phone is in the van being recharged. I’m so damned efficient. I look over at the picnic table and wonder if I can pull myself up. When I lift my arms, they hurt so bad I don’t even bother trying. John is sitting on the ground, talking to himself.
I hiss at him. “John, I need you to be okay right now. Come on. Let’s try to get over to the van. Can you move very well?”
He takes a long, pained breath. “I don’t know.”
“Can you get up? Try using the picnic table.”
John slides himself over to the table. I watch him wince as he wraps his arms around the seat of the table. He’s usually much more agile than me, but the fall took it out of him.
“I can’t lift myself,” he says.
“Put your back to the bench, maybe you can lift yourself that way.”