The Leisure Seeker (15 page)

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.”

John does what I say. “Now put pressure against the table and try to lift yourself with your hands. Now see if you can get some traction with your feet.”

“Damn it,” says John, almost getting his elbow up onto the bench. Then he collapses back into the dirt.

I am picturing how it could be done in my head, but we’re both shook up and scared and dirty and tired. I want to cry, but it won’t do any good. We’ll still be here on the ground when I’m done bawling.

John hurts his back trying to do it again. I decide that it’s my turn. I know I won’t be able to lift myself up onto the picnic table, but I look over at the steps that flip out from the Leisure Seeker when you open the side door. It’s about fifteen feet from where I am, so I steel myself for the long rough scoot over there.

“What are you doing?” says John.

“I’m going to get over to the door of the van, see if I can get in that way.”

John grunts. But I can’t tell if it’s a “That’s a good idea” grunt or a “You’re out of your mind” grunt.

It takes me a good fifteen minutes to get halfway there. I lift, I scoot. I lift, I scoot. I am literally moving an inch at a time. The ground is hard here, so very hard, so many stones and pebbles biting into my hands and fanny. I’m sweating pretty bad now and it doesn’t take long before it’s in my eyes. This is the problem with having almost no hair—sweat goes straight down into your eyes. As I stop and wipe under my glasses with my filthy hands, I remember something from a guidebook, how we are in what the Mexicans called the “bad country.” All the rock formations caused by black lava, with tinges of red that was supposed to be the blood of an awful
monster slain by some gods of war. I don’t know why I remember these things, but I can’t help it.

The bad country indeed. I’m afraid the black earth is already tinged with the blood of this fat old broad. It’s certainly getting no softer as I shrimp my way to the van. I’m numb from all this scraping, but for once I’m glad I’ve got this big rump to protect myself from the ground. This would hurt a lot more if I were one of those bony, rail-thin, smoked-for-a-hundred-years old crones. But then, if I was one of them, I could probably stand up.

John has given up and laid his head against the bench of the picnic table.

“John, why don’t you start heading over here yourself? If I can get up a little bit, maybe you can help.”

He lifts his head up from the bench, nods, then lays it back down, lulled to sleep by the whirr of the projector. I’m on my own.

Something happens when you’re stuck on the ground in the near-dark, scared to death, not sure if you’re ever going to stand up again, wondering what kind of shape you’ll be in when they find you here in the morning. This is what happens: time stretches, pulls and folds itself over, then stretches itself again like Turkish Taffy that’s been in your pocket all day. Right now, I have no idea if we’ve been on the ground for two hours or twenty minutes.

I keep scooting, nothing else to do. John is asleep by the bench. He will wake up wondering what he’s doing on the ground. He will blame me for it, I’m sure of it. I get blamed
just because I’m the only person around to blame. That’s what will happen. He will awaken in a foul mood, thinking I’ve pushed him to the ground. He will yell at me.

Ow. Ow. Ow.
I keep scooting. I hear that damn coyote again. If he comes here, thinking he’s got an easy meal, he will be wrong. He will find what he thinks is a big fat buffet, but he won’t think that for long. He will find a fight. I fought two men yesterday, so I’m not afraid of a coyote. I will kill him with my hands.

This is not where we are supposed to die.

After three breathers, cutting my hand on a piece of glass, crushing a large bug that I first think is a scorpion, but turns out to be a cicada or something, I’m finally at the steps of the van. They are small aluminum flip-down steps, very narrow, much too narrow for my wide beam, but I know they are sturdy because they are what we use to step into the van. Best of all, they are only a couple of inches from the dirt.

I back myself up to the lowest step, feel it with my wrists, which are mostly numb by this time. I take a hard breath and lift. I’m shaking, but I manage to raise myself onto the step. The narrow sides dig deep into my fanny, but at least I’m able to stay put. My tailbone feels secure on the step. It’s such a relief just to be above the ground, I want to rest for about a half hour, but I don’t. I grip the sides of the tiny steps and try to pull myself up again. This time, I can push ever so slightly with my heels as well. I make it up to the second step, but my butt does not feel as secure as it did on the first step. I shift my hands up farther, above the second step, and kick hard into
the dirt with my heels. I’m so exhausted by this time, the tears are pouring from my eyes, but if I don’t do this, we’re going to be on the ground all night. I don’t know if we can survive that.

I push hard and make it to the third step. I’m sitting on my hands now and it hurts. I pull one hand out, then the other, taking care not to lose my balance. I’m shaking so badly now, I don’t know what to do.

“John!” I yell to him, as loudly as I can. I realize that I have not been yelling loudly enough, for fear of waking others. There’s no one around. If there was, they could help us.

“John! Goddamn it!” I scream this time and it rouses him slightly. I see the head rise from the bench, then fall back down.